Who Really Gave Us the Bible?

Many people have grown up hearing that the Roman Catholic Church “gave us the Bible.” It is true that the Latin-speaking Western Church preserved and copied Scripture for many centuries, but modern research in New Testament textual criticism has shown that the story is far broader, older, and more international than that. The Bible as we know it came out of the complex life of the early Christian movement, which spread from the eastern Mediterranean into many cultures and languages long before any single institution could claim control.

The collection of studies titled “The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research,” edited by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, represents the most complete modern survey of what scholars have learned about how the New Testament text developed. Each chapter was written by a specialist; people such as Eldon Epp, Bruce Metzger, Peter Head, Gordon Fee, David Parker, and many others; and together they tell a remarkably consistent story. The evidence shows that the New Testament was not invented or rewritten by any later church hierarchy. Instead, it was copied, translated, and standardized over the centuries by communities in many parts of the ancient world.

The New Testament books were written in Greek between roughly 50 and 100 CE. They circulated first among local Christian communities in places such as Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. These early believers were bilingual or multilingual, and copies of the Gospels and letters were shared across regions in a fairly informal network. There was no single “official” version or institution that managed the text. As Eldon Epp puts it, the earliest period of transmission was a “living tradition” in which local scribes and teachers handed on what they had received, sometimes adding clarifying words, sometimes harmonizing details, and sometimes simply making mistakes as they copied by hand. The result was a family of closely related but not identical copies.

The Roman or Latin-speaking Church entered the story later. By the late second century, Western Christians were translating the Greek Scriptures into Latin. Several early versions circulated until Jerome, in the late fourth century, produced a careful revision called the Vulgate. Jerome worked from Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and aimed to produce a consistent text for the Western world. His Latin translation became the standard Bible of the Middle Ages, but he did not invent the content. The Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the other books had already existed for centuries in Greek and, in some cases, in Syriac and Coptic translations. Jerome’s work therefore represents a consolidation and translation of the existing text, not its creation. As Bruce Metzger summarized, the Vulgate was a revision of earlier Latin versions, not a new creation of the biblical text.

Modern research has also illuminated how important the Eastern churches were in preserving and transmitting Scripture. In the region of Edessa and Nisibis, Christians spoke Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. They produced one of the earliest Bible translations, the Syriac Peshitta, which was in widespread use by the early 300s. Even earlier, in the second century, the Syrian scholar Tatian produced a gospel harmony called the Diatessaron, weaving the four Gospels into one continuous narrative. This Diatessaron was read across the East for centuries before later bishops replaced it with the four separate Gospels. Meanwhile, in Egypt, Christians were translating the Scriptures into Coptic, creating another major witness to the early text. These traditions show that the Bible was never a purely Western project. Its roots and much of its preservation lie in the Semitic and Greek-speaking East.

Another crucial piece of the story is the formation of the biblical canon. The process of deciding which writings belonged to the New Testament took several centuries. By the end of the second century, most Christian communities already recognized the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, and several other books as authoritative. Lists of these books appear in the Muratorian Fragment and other documents. In the fourth century, councils such as Hippo (393 CE) and Carthage (397 CE) merely confirmed what was already common practice across the Mediterranean world. As F. F. Bruce observed, those councils did not create the canon; they acknowledged the list that had already achieved broad acceptance. By that time, the Syriac, Coptic, and Greek churches were all using essentially the same collection of writings.

The great discoveries of early papyrus manuscripts during the twentieth century have confirmed how stable the New Testament text actually is. Scholars now have more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus thousands of early translations and quotations in the Church Fathers. The oldest papyri date from the second and third centuries, only a few generations after the originals were written. When these papyri are compared with later medieval copies, the differences are mostly small; spelling variations, word order changes, and accidental omissions. As Peter Head and others have shown, the early papyri confirm rather than overturn the traditional text. There is no evidence of a "massive" editorial revision or doctrinal rewrite by any church authority. What we see is the normal pattern of human copying, with scribes trying to reproduce the sacred text as faithfully as possible.

Because these discoveries made the manuscript evidence more complex, modern editors now speak of reconstructing the “initial text” rather than the single “original.” They recognize that what can be recovered is the earliest form preserved in the surviving copies, which is often extremely close to the author’s own wording. The Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies Greek New Testaments, used for all modern translations, are therefore “working texts” that represent the consensus of centuries of careful comparison. This approach is transparent and scholarly, not institutional. It demonstrates that the text of the Bible has been established through open, international research rather than by decree.

Another topic that modern research has clarified is the role of the so-called “majority text” or “Textus Receptus,” the form of the Greek text that underlies the King James Version. Studies show that this text type arose in the Byzantine Empire in the medieval period and represents a later stage of the textual tradition. The earliest papyri and uncial manuscripts are not Byzantine in character. The majority of later copies share readings that developed over time, not from the earliest strata. For this reason, the claim that the medieval “Received Text” preserves the exact original form is not supported by the evidence.

When all this data is assembled, the picture becomes clear. The Bible was not the creation of the Roman Catholic Church or of any single denomination. It was born in the first-century world of Greek and Aramaic-speaking believers. It was translated and transmitted by Jewish and Gentile Christians across the East and West. The Roman Church, along with the Greek Orthodox, Syriac, and Coptic Churches, became one of several custodians of the text. Each preserved it in its own language, and together they ensured its survival.

Modern textual criticism therefore disproves the simplistic idea that the Bible was invented, edited, or owned by any later religious power. Instead, it shows a remarkable continuity: the same Gospels and letters, recognizable in the earliest fragments, passed through countless hands and languages but retained their essential content.

The Latin Church undeniably rendered a monumental service by preserving the manuscripts of Scripture through the long centuries of the Middle Ages, safeguarding them in monasteries and scriptoria when much of Europe was descending into cultural ruin. Yet at the same time, it placed those very Scriptures beyond the reach of the people they were meant to guide. For many generations, access to the Bible was restricted to the clergy, and translating it into the language of the common people was often treated as a crime against the Church itself. Those who dared to render the sacred text into the tongues of their countrymen were branded as heretics, exiled, imprisoned, or burned at the stake. The same institution that guarded the Word also silenced it, preserving the letter of Scripture while preventing its light from freely reaching the world.The origins and early transmission of the Bible belong to the global Christian movement of the first centuries, not to a manufactured hierarchy that arose centuries later.

In plain terms, the historical and textual evidence shows that the Bible is older than the Roman Church, broader than any one tradition, and shared by all who trace their faith back to the earliest Christian communities. The Roman Catholic Church helped preserve and disseminate it, but it did not invent it. The Greek East, the Syriac-speaking churches, the Coptic believers of Egypt, and countless anonymous scribes all took part in giving the world this collection of writings. Modern scholars, comparing thousands of manuscripts with scientific precision, have confirmed that despite the vast transmission history, the message of the New Testament remains stable and recognizable from its earliest copies onward.

The research represented by Bart Ehrman, Michael Holmes, Bruce Metzger, F. F. Bruce, Sebastian Brock, and many others has therefore settled one question: the Bible is not the product of medieval manipulation. It is the product of centuries of faithful transmission by diverse Christian communities. The phrase “the Roman Catholic Church gave us the Bible” is too narrow. The truth is richer: the early global Church gave us the Bible, and the Roman Church was one of several crucial guardians who kept it alive (and locked away) for future generations.

Did you know?

• The oldest known fragment of the New Testament is called Papyrus 52, a small piece of John 18 written about 125 CE—less than a century after the events it describes. It’s housed at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

• Scholars have catalogued over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, ranging from tiny scraps to complete books, plus about 10,000 Latin and 9,000 versions in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and other languages. No other ancient book is so well attested.

• The Peshitta (Syriac Bible) and early Coptic translations prove that Scripture was already spreading east and south from the Greek world by the 300s CE.

• The great Latin Bible of the West, Jerome’s Vulgate, finished about 405 CE, was a translation of these earlier Greek and Hebrew texts.

• Because so many manuscripts survive, every word of the New Testament can be cross-checked hundreds or even thousands of times. Fewer than one percent of textual differences affect the sense of a verse, and none alter the core message of Christian faith.

• Major early codices are held today in libraries and museums such as the British Library (London), the Vatican Library (Rome), the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris), and St Catherine’s Monastery (Sinai).

What the First Christians Actually Taught

When Jesus shared the bread and cup at the Last Supper, He told His disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Those words became the foundation of Christian worship across every tradition. But how did the earliest followers of Jesus understand that command? What did “remembrance” mean before later theological systems defined it in philosophical terms?

One of the most illuminating answers comes from the Peshitta, the ancient Syriac translation of the Bible used by early Aramaic-speaking Christians in the East. The Peshitta preserves the New Testament text in a language very close to what Jesus Himself spoke. Its wording gives us a glimpse of how the first Semitic believers heard the institution of the Lord’s Supper and how they understood the mystery of the Eucharist.

In the Peshitta’s version of Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24, Jesus’ words are rendered as, “Do this for my dukhrana.” The Syriac word dukhrana (ܕܘܟܪܢܐ) means remembrance, memorial, or commemoration. It comes from the Semitic root dkr, meaning “to remember” or “to call to mind,” the same root as the Hebrew zakar and zikaron. In the Old Testament, these words describe sacred memorials like the Passover: actions that recall God’s saving acts and make them present to the worshiper. A zikaron was never a mere mental recollection; it was a ritual act that placed the participant within the ongoing story of God’s covenant.

That same meaning carries into the Syriac Peshitta. When Jesus says, “Do this for my dukhrana,” He is not simply commanding His followers to think about Him once a year or to perform a symbolic reminder. He is calling them to enact a sacred memorial; a living remembrance that reconnects them with the saving reality of His death and resurrection. In Semitic thought, to “remember” before God is to bring a past act into the present by faithful participation. The act of remembrance is itself a way of entering into what God has done.

Early Syriac theologians took this seriously. Aphrahat, known as the Persian Sage, called the Eucharist “the remembrance of His death and resurrection” and “the sign of His covenant.” It was both a proclamation and a participation. The believer, by receiving the bread and wine with faith, entered the mystery of Christ’s redemptive work. Ephrem the Syrian, writing in hymns rather than treatises, spoke of the bread as “filled with Fire and Spirit,” meaning that Christ’s presence in the sacrament was spiritual and transformative, not material. He described the Eucharist in poetry because its reality could not be reduced to human definitions. For Ephrem, the faithful “eat Fire and Spirit” not because the bread’s substance changes, but because in the act of remembrance they meet the living Christ through the Spirit.

This is where the Syriac understanding differs sharply from later Western developments. In the medieval Latin Church, theologians sought to explain the Eucharist using the categories of Aristotelian philosophy. The doctrine of transubstantiation taught that the substance of the bread and wine changes into the body and blood of Christ, while their outward appearance (the “accidents”) remains the same. That doctrine was officially defined at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and refined by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It was an attempt to express the mystery in the logical terms of Western scholasticism.

The Syriac Peshitta, however, comes from a much earlier world; a Jewish and Aramaic world where remembrance, not metaphysics, was the language of worship. The Peshitta’s “Do this for my dukhrana” does not describe a change in substance; it describes a covenantal memorial, a sacred act of recalling and entering the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ through faith. In that ancient worldview, the bread and wine remain what they are, yet through prayer and remembrance they become instruments through which believers encounter the living Christ spiritually, not physically. Nor does the Peshitta suggest that a mere mortal can, by any rite or incantation, summon Christ into a wafer; such a notion would have been unthinkable to the Semitic mind. The early believers understood the sacred meal as obedience and thanksgiving, not as an act of metaphysical manipulation.

It describes a sacred act of memory that makes the saving event present to the believer’s heart. The bread and wine are ordinary elements, yet through faith and thanksgiving they become the appointed signs through which Christ is spiritually encountered. The mystery is not in the transformation of matter but in the transformation of the believer, who through remembrance and faith is joined to the one sacrifice of Christ.

This distinction matters, because it shows that the early Church’s understanding of the Eucharist was deeply rooted in the Semitic tradition of covenant memorials. In the Jewish Passover, Israel remembered the Exodus not as a distant story but as a living event. Every generation said, “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.” The act of remembering made the past real in the present. When Jesus took bread and wine and gave them new meaning as the sign of the new covenant, He was drawing directly from that heritage. The Syriac word dukhrana preserves that connection better than any later translation.

In practice, the Syriac liturgy reflected this theology. The ancient Anaphora of Addai and Mari, one of the oldest Eucharistic prayers in the world, centers on thanksgiving, praise, and remembrance. It never tries to define how Christ is present in the elements. Instead, it trusts that through the prayer of remembrance and the work of the Holy Spirit, the Church truly participates in the mystery of redemption. The focus is not on the bread changing but on the community being changed through grace.

So while later Western theology developed the idea of transubstantiation (akin to pagan Baal rituals) the Syriac Peshitta keeps us closer to the world of Jesus and His disciples. Its Semitic phrase reminds us that remembrance, not transformation of matter, is at the heart of the Eucharist. The power of the meal lies in what it proclaims and what it makes present: the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ remembered, received, and rejoiced in by His people.

That is the beauty of the Peshitta’s teaching. It shows that the earliest Christians understood the Lord’s Supper as a living memorial, not a metaphysical formula.

Confession and Repentance

In the Peshitta and in the writings of the early Syriac Fathers, confession is an act of honesty before God, a return of the heart. The term most often used is tawba; repentance or turning. Aphrahat calls repentance “a covenant with God,” not a ritual requiring satisfaction. There is no system of penance or juridical accounting for sins. Forgiveness is sought through contrition, prayer, and reconciliation with the community. Ephrem’s hymns speak of tears, humility, and mercy, never of imposed penance or a treasury of merits.

The idea of penitential acts prescribed by a priest and the later doctrine of indulgences developed centuries later in the Latin West. They reflect a legal metaphor for sin and forgiveness that does not appear in Syriac sources. For the early Aramaic-speaking believers, repentance was medicine for the soul, not punishment for debt.

Mary and the Saints

In the Syriac Bible and hymns, Mary is honored as “Mother of the Messiah” and “blessed among women.” She is the model of obedience and purity, but always a redeemed human being. The doctrines of the Immaculate Conception is unknown in the Syriac heritage. They arose from Western attempts to systematize holiness and authority, not from the Semitic worldview of the first believers.

In the Syriac Bible, the word for saint; qaddisha; simply means “holy one” or “righteous person.” When the Peshitta speaks of “the saints,” it is not describing a later class of canonized figures who are prayed to after death. It is speaking about the living faithful, the men and women who strive to walk in holiness on earth. Paul’s letters in the Peshitta greet “the saints in Corinth,” “the saints in Ephesus,” and “all the saints in Christ Jesus.” These are ordinary believers, still alive, who form the holy community of the Church.

Early Syriac commentaries continue that usage. Aphrahat and Ephrem speak of “the saints” as the righteous who live by faith and charity; they are examples for others and they intercede for their brothers and sisters through prayer. That intercession, however, is the prayer of living members of the Church on behalf of one another. It is never described as petitioning the spirits of the dead. When the Syriac liturgies mention the memory of martyrs, they do so as remembrance and thanksgiving, not as requests for the dead to act on earth.

The practice of addressing prayers to departed saints developed centuries later in the wider "Christian" world, first as memorial devotion at the tombs of martyrs and eventually as a formal system of intercession. The Syriac sources closest to the apostolic period do not contain that theology. For them, holiness was a present calling, not an otherworldly status. The saints are the righteous who live among us, praying for their communities and serving as examples of the life of the Spirit.

Authority and Community

The early Syriac Church organized itself around local bishops, presbyters, and elders who served as shepherds of their own communities. Leadership was pastoral rather than imperial, and authority flowed from spiritual character and faithfulness to Scripture, not from institutional hierarchy. Unity was maintained through shared worship, shared Scripture, and a shared understanding of the faith handed down from the apostles, not by submission to a single head or central office. The bond between the churches of Edessa, Nisibis, and the East was spiritual, rooted in fellowship and doctrine, not in political control.

The Syriac Bible: the Peshitta; developed within this context. Its canon, originally containing twenty-two New Testament books, took shape in the East entirely independent of Rome. By the time Western councils in the late fourth and fifth centuries finalized the twenty-seven-book canon, Syriac Christians had already been reading, copying, and teaching from their Scriptures for generations. This simple historical fact demonstrates beyond dispute that the Bible did not originate from papal authority. The Word of God was already alive in the East, forming the heart of Christian faith, long before the Latin Church began defining its boundaries and issuing decrees.

In this decentralized structure, no bishop or patriarch claimed universal supremacy. The title “Catholicos” or “Patriarch” in the East denoted a guardian and teacher of the faith, not an infallible ruler. Authority was collegial and communal; bishops met in synods, consulted Scripture, and sought consensus through prayer. The measure of authority was fidelity to the apostolic Word, not personal office or political power. The Eastern churches believed that truth was preserved in the community of the faithful guided by the Holy Spirit, not in one man’s pronouncements.

Doctrines such as papal infallibility or universal jurisdiction have no parallel in the Syriac or Aramaic tradition. To the early believers of the East, the idea that any one bishop could claim absolute authority over all others would have been foreign and unacceptable. Their model of the Church resembled a body, not a pyramid: Christ alone was the head, and every member was responsible for remaining true to His Word. This structure preserved both unity and freedom, allowing the faith to flourish across vast regions without dependence on any single seat of power. The Syriac Church thus stands as living proof that Christianity could thrive and remain faithful to the Scriptures without the centralizing force of papal rule.

Sin, Death, and Salvation

In the Peshitta’s version of Romans 5:12, humanity inherits mortality “because of him in whom all have sinned.” The emphasis here is not on legal guilt but on death; mortality itself ; as the condition from which Christ rescues us. Sin is seen not primarily as a crime demanding retribution, but as a disease that leads to decay and death. Humanity shares in Adam’s fallen state, not by inheriting his guilt, but by sharing his broken condition. We are born into a world wounded by sin and subject to death’s dominion, and it is from this captivity that Christ delivers us.

In the Syriac tradition, salvation is always described in healing, life-giving terms. Christ is the physician of souls, the divine healer who restores the image of God in humankind. Ephrem the Syrian often calls Christ “the Medicine of Life” and the “Healer of our wounds.” This image captures the heart of the Syriac understanding: sin has disfigured the divine likeness within us, and salvation is the process by which that likeness is made whole again. Redemption is restoration, not legal satisfaction.

This differs profoundly from the later Western interpretation of Romans 5:12, which came to view humanity as inheriting the guilt of Adam’s transgression; a juridical concept foreign to Semitic thought. The Syriac text instead reflects the worldview of the ancient East, where God’s justice and mercy are not opposed but united in healing. The Savior’s work is not to pay a legal debt but to break the power of death, to raise the fallen image, and to breathe new life into the human spirit. It fits perfectly with the language of Jesus’ own Aramaic preaching: repent, be healed, be made whole.

The Spirit and the Creed

In the Nicene Creed used throughout the Syriac churches, the Holy Spirit is confessed as “proceeding from the Father.” That wording is not accidental; it reflects the creed as it was formulated by the early councils and as it was understood by the Greek and Syriac-speaking Christians of the first centuries. The later Western addition of the phrase “and the Son” (known as the Filioque) never appeared in the Syriac texts or liturgies. For the Syriac Fathers, the original language of the creed preserved a delicate and beautiful balance: the Father as the ultimate source of divinity, the Son as the one through whom all things were made, and the Spirit as the divine breath and life that flows from the Father through the Son into creation and the Church.

This was not a matter of mere wording; it reflected a different theological worldview. In the East, the Trinity was understood as a living communion, not a philosophical puzzle. The Spirit’s procession “from the Father” emphasized that the Father is the fountain of life, the eternal origin of the Son and of the Spirit alike. Yet this Spirit is also the Spirit of Christ, because He is sent into the world through the Son’s redemptive work. The Syriac theologians saw no contradiction in this; for them, the Spirit’s mission was to unite humanity with the divine life revealed in Christ.

The Filioque addition, introduced centuries later in the Latin West, altered that balance by suggesting a double procession; from the Father and the Son; and it became a central theological dispute between East and West. Syriac Christianity never adopted the change, holding instead to the original expression of the Creed that linked back to the earliest formulations of faith.

Why These Differences Matter

The Syriac tradition shows that early Christianity thrived without the later structures and doctrines of the Latin West. Its Scriptures, liturgies, and commentaries preserve a simpler, more Semitic faith; centered on remembrance, repentance, and community rather than on hierarchy or philosophical precision. When believers study the Peshitta and the writings of Tatian, Ephrem, and Aphrahat, they glimpse a Christianity that still breathes the air of the first century:

– a church that confessed directly to God, not through penance; – a Eucharist celebrated as remembrance, not as a metaphysical transformation; – salvation understood as healing, not legal pardon; – Mary revered as blessed, not as immaculately conceived; – authority shared among bishops, not vested in a single infallible figure.

This isn’t speculation; it’s what the texts themselves show. The faith that arose in the Aramaic-speaking East kept the rhythm and simplicity of the gospel before it was filtered through the languages and philosophies of empire. In recovering that world, modern readers are reminded that Christianity’s roots reach deeper than any later institution and that the voice of the Peshitta still speaks in the tongue closest to the one Jesus Himself used.

The question of who holds authority in Christianity; the Bible or church tradition; can only be answered by going back to the beginning. When the origins of the faith are traced through the Syriac Peshitta and the earliest Aramaic-speaking churches, the evidence is unambiguous: the Bible came first, it shaped the Church, and its authority stands above every later tradition. The written Word existed, was preached, and was obeyed centuries before the Roman hierarchy or any Western council attempted to define doctrine. The Church was born from Scripture; Scripture was never born from the Church.

Jesus and His disciples spoke Aramaic. The first believers in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Edessa lived in a Semitic world where the Word of God was proclaimed and written down long before it was surrounded by the institutions of empire. The Syriac Bible; the Peshitta; preserves that original world. It shows that the Gospels and apostolic letters were already functioning as sacred, binding authority long before anyone spoke of papal decrees or church traditions. The Christians of the East received their faith from the Word itself, not from a later institution’s interpretation of it.

The writings of the Syriac Fathers make this clear. Aphrahat, Ephrem the Syrian, and the teachers of Edessa did not appeal to unwritten customs or the authority of Rome; they built their theology directly on the Scriptures. Every doctrine, every moral teaching, every act of worship was defended by the text. When they spoke of “tradition,” they meant the faithful handing down of the Scriptures and their meaning; not a body of new dogmas added centuries later. Theirs was a religion of the Word, not of decrees. It was Scripture that gave life to their worship, their poetry, and their theology. In their world, the Bible was not one authority among others; it was the only authority.

History itself proves this point. Before there was a Latin Church, before councils met to decide canons, believers in the East were already reading the same Gospels and letters. They had copied them, translated them, and built their lives around them. The Bible did not depend on a later hierarchy, purple robes, and thrones for its existence. It produced communities of faith on its own power. The unity of early Christianity came from the Scriptures they shared, not from a single institution commanding obedience. When disputes arose, they turned to the Word of God, not to a central office.

That is why the earliest Syriac texts contain none of the later Roman doctrines. The Peshitta knows nothing of purgatory, indulgences, papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, or transubstantiation. It contains no trace of the elaborate penance system, no indulgences, no treasury of merits. These are later inventions, built centuries after the New Testament had already spoken with final authority. Their very absence in the oldest Christian sources exposes them for what they are: later human traditions added to the faith. The Bible existed complete and powerful before these ideas ever appeared. Therefore, it cannot be subject to them.

Whenever the Church has lost its way, renewal has come by returning to Scripture. That pattern is unmistakable. Syriac scholars like Jacob of Edessa and Bar Hebraeus went back to the original text to correct corruption and recover truth. Centuries later, the Western reformers did the same. They knew that truth does not flow from tradition; it flows from the written Word that judges all traditions. The Bible has always been the measuring rod by which every teaching and every authority must be tested.

The authority of the Bible over tradition is not a theory; it is the historical reality of the Christian faith. The Peshitta and other early versions show that Christianity was already alive, complete, and authoritative before any Roman council defined orthodoxy. The Scriptures were the foundation of doctrine, worship, and morality. The Church did not give the world the Bible; the Bible gave the world the Church. That is why no later council, no hierarchy, and no evolving tradition can claim equal standing with the Word of God.

The Syriac Peshitta, written in a language close to that of Christ Himself, stands as living proof. It demonstrates that the first believers trusted the Scriptures as their sole and final authority. Tradition came later and must remain subordinate to the Word. The Bible is not the child of the Church; it is the voice of God that created the Church. Every time history has tested that truth, the outcome has been the same: human tradition bends; the Word of God stands.

Happy Sabbath.