As a crisis developed within the early Christian Church a defender of truth was needed. God found His hero in Lucian (AD 250 ? 312) who was born in Antioch.

The early stories found in Acts took place in Jerusalem, but when the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70 many of the Christians fled to Antioch, the capital of Syria. It was there that they were first called “Christians.” (See Acts 11:26)

Antioch was a center of Greek life and culture. Young Lucian had to choose between the power, wealth, elegance and impurity of life in Antioch or the simple, quiet, and pious life found in the numerous surrounding Christian villages. He “quickly discerned that there were two movements taking shape in Christendom, one loose in doctrine and affiliating itself with heathenism, the other based on the deep foundations of the Christian faith.” Truth Triumphant 46.

Because Antioch was on the border between Rome and Persia, news and culture steadily streamed in. Lucian soon learned that “the churches of Rome and Alexandria had entered into an alliance. Alexandria had, for more than two centuries before Christ, been the real capital of the Jews who were compromising with paganism.” Truth Triumphant 47. Reviewing the history of the Jewish nation Lucien could see the effect of accepting the Greek education taught in Alexandria. It was because of their acceptance of Greek culture - the sports, arts and education - that the Jews were unprepared to accept Christ. “The church at Alexandria was in this atmosphere. The city of Rome had been for seven hundred years, and was still to be for some time, the world capital of paganism. This environment greatly influenced the church at Rome. Lucian grew up in the churches of Syria and of the Near East, which were modeled after the churches of Judea. Lucian founded a college at Antioch which strove to counteract the dangerous ecclesiastical alliance between Rome and Alexandria.” Truth Triumphant 47.

There were a number of things which separated the two colleges.
(1) Those that started the college at Alexandria exalted tradition.
(2) Clement, the most famous teacher at Alexandria, boasted that he would not teach Christianity unless it were mixed with pagan philosophy.
(3) Victor I, bishop of Rome, made an agreement with Clement, (about AD 190) for his help to make Sunday the prominent day of worship in the church.

It was from this time that there began to be seen a real separation between the Church of the East and the Church of Rome. The school in Antioch trained many young people in theology, the arts, sciences, and architecture. Those defenders of the faith followed the counsel of Jude in his epistle: “Ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” Jude 3.

Lucian’s greatest gift to Protestant history was his editing of what we call today the Textus Receptus, or Received Text. Lucian took all the manuscripts that were known to the early Christians and compiled them together into the “New Testament.”

Dr Wilkinson states that, “The Protestant denominations are built upon that manuscript of the Greek New Testament, sometimes called the Textus Receptus, or Received Text. It is that Greek New Testament from which the writings of the apostles have been translated into the various languages. During the Dark Ages, the Received Text was practically unknown... It was restored to Christendom by the labors of that great scholar, Erasmus. However, neither Lucian nor Erasmus, but rather the apostles wrote the Greek New Testament.” Truth Triumphant 50.

Origen, the teacher at the Alexandrian college, also made translations and commentaries of the Bible. These were written in such a way that they allowed many kinds of errors to be introduced into Christianity. David Otis Fuller in his book, Which Bible? tells us that the Textus Receptus was the Bible of the early Eastern Christians. From this manuscript came the Bibles for the great Syrian church, the Waldensian Church of northern Italy, the Gallic Church in southern France, the Celtic Church in Scotland, and Ireland, and the Greek Catholic Church. The Textus Receptus is also called the Majority Text because it was based on the majority (90%) of the 5000+ Greek manuscripts in existence. It did not have material added, removed or modified as did the Minority Text.

Today we have an explosion of new Bibles. However very few use the Textus Receptus as the basis for their translations as the King James Version did. Satan, doing everything that he can to lead people away from God, has found a very clever way to give us something that looks like Scripture but actually contains some of his lies in place of God’s truths.

What did Lucian achieve? Dr. Wilkinson brings out the following points:

• “The Antioch system of theology extended from England to China and from Turkestan to Ethiopia….
  
• “Lucian and his school produced and edited a definite and complete Bible…
  
• “The text which Lucian gave to the world was to all intents pure and correct. Even his opponents declare that there are no Greek New Testaments older than Lucian's…
  
• Antioch taught salvation through the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross, and the binding obligation of the Ten Commandments
  
• “The majority of the churches of Syria and of the East continued to observe Saturday, the Sabbath of the fourth commandment from the days of the apostles and throughout the centuries….
  
• The church organization rejected the union of church and state. Truth Triumphant 59-61.

The two classes of Christianity that Lucian found still exist today. For this reason, it is very important to check our beliefs against the Bible, to be sure we are following it and not man’s traditions.

For more information on Bible Translations: Battle of the Bible by H.H. Meyers; New Age Versions by Gail Riplinger; Which Bible? By David Otis Fuller; The Authorized Bible Vindicated by B.G. Wilkinson.

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