Discovering God - Trusting the Bible
Why trust the
text of the Bible, when it s been translated and copied countless times?
Many people
today believe the scenario expressed by fiction author, Dan Brown, who says
the Bible is unreliable because it has evolved through countless
translations, additions and revisions. [1] None of that is true.
Translation
Let's start
with translation. Today's Bible scholars translate the text exactly once from
Hebrew (for the Old Testament) or Greek (for the New Testament) to English.
Today's Bible translations are compiled by committees of scholars working
together to compare and accurately translate ancient texts. It would be
unthinkable for modern translators to use a recent translation as the text
from which they translate.
The notion
that copying a text renders it unknowable is also false. Consider that every
well known text we have from antiquity has been copied, but nobody doubts
that the copies reliably reproduce the original. Have you ever read Plato,
Homer, or any other ancient author? Were you haunted by the thought that you
have no idea whether the text is reliable? Probably not, because copyists are
fully capable of transmitting the original content. They don t have to be
perfect because the meaning still comes across.
Manuscript evidence
Many are
surprised to learn that our copies of the Bible are vastly superior to any
other text from antiquity. For most ancient books, we have no copies closer
than five hundred to fifteen hundred years distant from the time of original
writing. With the New Testament, we have pieces from within twenty five years
of the original and whole manuscripts not much later. Also, ancient biblical
copies number in the thousands by far more than other ancient texts (most
have fewer than ten ancient copies). Comparing these copies gives scholars a
high level of confidence that we have an accurate text.
For the Old
Testament, the gap between the last book and our earliest manuscripts used to
be fourteen hundred years. Then, when the Dead Sea Scrolls surfaced, it went
down to as little as a couple hundred years. The Scrolls also confirmed that
later manuscripts had been transmitted with a good level of accuracy, because
even though they are twelve hundred years earlier than our oldest manuscripts
at the time, the vast majority of verses read word for word the same.
Skeptical attack
After
enlightenment scholars launched two centuries of attack on the integrity of
the biblical text, more recent text discoveries have confirmed an excellent
level of accuracy from cover to cover. In one case after another, archeology has
confirmed the biblical claim over enlightenment fabrications. Archeology is
one of the newer sciences, and most of the most important manuscripts and excavations
were not available to the enlightenment critics.