If what we had were the original documents only, then anyone could raise the accusation that they had been altered by someone and there would be no defense. However, with manuscript copies all over the world, such alternation – or for that matter, any collusion to alter the documents – would be impossible because no one could possibly round up all of the copies and change them.

A certain preacher was sitting in the dining car of a train traveling along the Hudson River. Opposite him was an atheist who, seeing the minister’s Bible, started a discussion. "I see you are a preacher," said the atheist. "Yes," came the reply. "I am a minister of the gospel." "I suppose you believe that Bible," said the man, with a tone of condescension in his voice. "I certainly do believe the Bible to be the Word of God." "But aren’t there things in that Bible that you can’t explain?" With humility the minister answered, "Yes, there are places in the Bible that I don’t understand." With an air of triumph as though he had cornered the preacher, the atheist asked, "Well, what do you do then?" Unruffled, the minister went on eating his dinner - which happened to be Hudson shad, a tasty fish but also one noted for its bony structure. Looking up, he said, "Sir, I do just the same as when eating this shad. When I come to the bones, I put them to the side of the plate and go on enjoying my lunch. I leave the bones for some fool to choke on."

We are continuing our series this morning called "God’s Word – the Bible." We’ve been talking about how the Bible came to us. This is message number 11 in the series and it will be the last one for now. I may re-start it again at a later time to address some additional important things about the bible.

Let me begin this morning by posing a couple of questions…

How do we know that the books of the Bible we have today have the same content as the original ancient documents? After all, we don’t have the original autographs. Hasn’t the Bible changed drastically over the years as it was copied and re-copied by hand?

Further, how do we know that there wasn’t collusion at some point along the way to the extent that those who came into possession of the original documents purposely corrupted them?

Every true Christian realizes that having an accurate and trustworthy Bible – that is, having a reliable copy of what was originally written by God’s prophets and apostles, is a matter of spiritual life and death. If our Bibles are not reliable, how can we ever know what was originally intended for us by God? Can we trust our modern Bibles to be accurate?

I few messages back I gave you a list of seven links in the chain of transmission of the Bible from God to us. Perhaps by now they’ll have a ring of familiarity to you. They are: Revelation, inspiration, documentation, circulation, canonization, replication, and translation. We have come down to the last two: replication and translation and I want to cover both this morning. Replication deals with copying and recopying the scriptures so that they are accurately transmitted from one generation to the next. Translation has to do with bringing them accurately from the original languages to us as English speaking people.

In order to answer the questions we have posed about the accuracy of our modern Bibles we must consider the textual evidence available for proving the Bible’s reliability. The field of study associated with such investigation is called textual criticism. The scholars working in this field are called textual critics. It is a field of study much too wide for us to cover here but let me give you a brief summary of:

Before 1947 the oldest copy we had of the Old Testament Hebrew text of the Bible dated back to 900 A.D. It is called the Massoretic Text. It is the product of a group of Hebrew scholar/scribes called Massoretes. The Massoretes flourished between 500 and 1000 A.D., well before the invention of the printing press in 1452 A.D. Their main work was preserving and transmitting the text of the Hebrew scriptures from generation to generation. The level of their commitment to this task was very high. The Massoretic scribe was a professional copyist whose entire life was devoted to the calling and its strict rules. Scrolls used for the meticulously made copies could only be prepared from ceremonially clean animals raised by other Jews. Each column of writing could be no less than 48 and no more than 60 lines. Ink could be black only, made according to a prescribed recipe. No word or letter could be written from memory. Only an approved authentic manuscript could be copied. The scribe was required to pronounce each word aloud before copying it. Each time the word "Elohim" (the most common designation for God) was written, the scribe was required to reverently wipe his pen. Each time the word YHWH (the actual Name of God) was written the scribe was required to fully wash his entire body lest God’s holy Name be contaminated. Strict rules were adhered to as to forms of letters, spaces, words, sections, and use of pens. Every word in a copy was counted and compared to the original. If a single letter was added to omitted, the entire scroll was destroyed.

While these rules may seem a bit over the top to us today, this shows us that copying the Old Testament Scriptures was not an issue taken lightly among the Jewish people.

But you may be wondering if the oldest copy of the Old Testament we have is the Massoretic Text from 900 A.D., some 1400 years after the last book of the Old Testament was written, and it could only be copied by hand, given man’s tendency to make mistakes, how could we possibly have an accurate text today?

In fact, this very line of thought has often been used by skeptics and unbelievers as a reason for rejecting the Bible. Of course if the document we have is accurate, proof or lack of proof doesn’t alter that a bit. What we’re dealing with is whether or not our text for our Old Testament is reliable. Yet until the 20^th century there was little additional evidence available to prove its accuracy.

Today there are two primary pieces of evidence for the accuracy of our modern Old Testament: The so-called Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek Septuagint Version.

In 1947 a young Bedouin goat herder found some clay jars in a cave near the Dead Sea that contained some very old leather scrolls. When these scrolls were examined by experts they turned out to be very old copies of some of the books of the Old Testament that had been kept by a Jewish monastic sect at a community called Qumran which existed between 150 B.C. and 70 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls consisted of a complete book of Isaiah, a fragmented copy of Isaiah, and portions of nearly every book of our Old Testament. The majority of the writings are from Isaiah and the Pentateuch. The books of Samuel were found, along with two complete chapters of Habakkuk. Some other non-biblical writings were also found which pertained to particularly to the Qumran sect.

The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls was that now we could compare our oldest text of the Old Testament (the Massoretic text) with copies of the Hebrew Scriptures written 1000 years earlier. Was it possible to preserve reasonable accuracy over that amount of time, or not? Also, that a copy of Isaiah was found that predated Christ was very significant since Isaiah contains a great number of Messianic prophecies which are so accurate that skeptics used to say they had to have been written after the time of Christ. Now, if the message was the same, the accuracy of the prophecies could be established.

So how much variation was there been between the documents found at Qumran and the earliest Massoretic text we possessed? There wasn’t very much difference. R. Laird Harris in the book, Can I Trust My Bible? writes:

According to Gleason Archer in his book, A Survey of the Old Testament, the Isaiah copies of the Qumran community "proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text. The 5% of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling."(2)

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a marvelous find for substantiating the accuracy of our modern Hebrew Old Testament.

The second piece of textual evidence for the accuracy of our modern Hebrew Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint Version. About 250 years before Christ the Library of Alexandria sponsored a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek language for the benefit of Jews who had been scattered from their homeland and no longer spoke their native Hebrew. Comparison between our oldest copies of this Greek version of the Old Testament and the Hebrew text of the Massoretes is summed up by Josh McDowel in his book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict:

Geisler and Nix, in their standard work, A General Introduction to the Bible, put it this way:

"It [the Septuagint Version - DR] bridges the textual criticism gap by its substantial agreement with the Hebrew Old Testament text…."(3)

That copyists worked with great dedication and care to replicate the Old Testament scriptures from ancient times down to us today is beyond question. While there is no perfectly accurate single text of the Old Testament in existence today, the texts we have can be demonstrated to be highly accurate when compared with other ancient documents and the areas in question can usually be resolved by thoughtful and careful consideration of such things as meaning and context.

As we continue now on the issue of replication we must also take a brief look at:

Establishing the accuracy of our New Testament documents is different than that of the Old Testament, both because the length of time between original and oldest copies is far less and because we have a lot more textual evidence available to us.

There are over 5,300 known ancient manuscript copies and fragments of the New Testament in the Greek language that have survived until today. In addition, there are 10,000 Latin manuscripts and over 9,300 other early manuscript versions in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and Ethiopic languages. This gives us a total of over 24,000 surviving manuscript copies in whole or part from which we can reconstruct an accurate text for the New Testament. (By the way, the field of study among scholars devoted to the task or reconstructing the New Testament is the science of "textual criticism. It is a fascinating field surely worth investigation, but beyond the scope of our purpose here.)

As for the antiquity of these surviving manuscripts, we have one fragment of the gospel of John that dates to within 25 years of the time the apostle John wrote. We have whole New Testament books that date to within about 100 years of the time they were written. We have most of the New Testament that dates back to within less than 200 years of the originals and copies of the entire New Testament within 250 years from the date of its completion. This is quite remarkable as ancient documents go.

In addition to this ever growing database of manuscript evidence, we have some 86,000 quotations from the New Testament among the writings of the early church fathers – so much, in fact, that even if we didn’t have a single manuscript copy of the New Testament – if those 24,000 copies were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth, we could still reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from these quotes that date within 150-200 years of the time of Christ.

Just how accurate is our modern New Testament text? I’ll quote the venerable Sir Frederick Kenyon, a great authority in the field of New Testament textual criticism:

John Warwick Montgomery in History and Christianity writes:

Perhaps you have been wondering, as we have talked about these many manuscripts, why it is that we don’t just have the originals. Wouldn’t it eliminate a lot of work if God had simply preserved the letters written by the apostles and prophets?

Well think about it. If what we had were the original documents only, then anyone could raise the accusation that they had been altered by someone and there would be no defense. However, with manuscript copies all over the world, such alternation – or for that matter, any collusion to alter the documents – would be impossible because no one could possibly round up all of the copies and change them.

Please understand that there is much more that could be said about the evidence we have for the accuracy of our modern texts of the Old and New Testaments. These brief remarks are meant only to help you see that such evidence exists in abundance.

There is one remaining link in the chain of issues between the Word of God as it was communicated to man through prophets and apostles in ancient times and our Bibles today. We’ve spoken of revelation, inspiration, documentation, circulation, canonization, and replication. Finally we recognize that we must have an accurate and understandable translation. So let me say a few words about that.

There is a need for a good translation. Let’s read a familiar passage together:

You recognize this verse, don’t you? It’s John 3:16 from the Greek New Testament.

Of course most of us could not read this verse in the original language. The same would be true of verses from the Old Testament in their native Hebrew. (I would put up a Hebrew passage from the Old Testament, except that I did not have a Hebrew font in my word processor.)

In order for God’s word to get through to us, it must be translated into a language we understand.

There are many translations of the Bible available today with new ones coming out on a fairly regular basis. What is a good translation of the Bible?

In some circles asking and answering such a question could get my lynched or burned at the stake! (I’m kidding, of course, but not too much.) Here are some:

A good translation is the result of scholars trying to transmit as much as is possible exactly what an author says. A good translation will be concerned with words and thoughts, not just thoughts. A paraphrase (The Living Bible by Ken Taylor is a very popular paraphrase) is not a translation. To write a paraphrase the author reads a portion of scripture, then puts it onto paper in his own words. Such an effort yields a commentary on the Bible, not a translation.

Any translator is subject to injecting his or her own prejudices and bias into such a work. The presence of other translators working together helps keep this in check.

Of course the reason is the same as for those done by individuals. Prejudice and bias tend to enter in. The Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation comes to mind – a work where passages have actually been altered in order to support JW doctrine.

I personally would not use a Bible that employs this method of translation as my main version. Dynamic equivalence is an attempt by translators to make an English version more readable and understandable to the uninitiated person – and what could be wrong with that? The problems can be seen by comparing the method of "dynamic equivalence" with something called "formal equivalence."

No English translation can be totally word for word and still be understood or read smoothly. That is because of the difference in the way people express themselves in different languages. However, "formal equivalence" (also called "formal correspondence) is an effort by translators to produce a word for word translation as closely as possible. Dynamic equivalence allows a looser form of translating. It is more "phrase for phrase" method, allowing the translator more liberty to choose words and phrases not found in the text that he or she feels better cause the impact on the reader that the original author intended. The problem comes when this liberty causes the translator to inject his or her own theological views and biases into the translation.

Examples of formal equivalence translations are the King James Version, the New King James Version, the American Standard Version, New American Standard Version. Examples of dynamic equivalence versions are the New English Bible, the Good News Bible, and the New International Version.

I realize that I am criticizing at least one very popular version of the Scriptures. I refer to the New International Version, which some of you use. Yet I firmly believe that Christians should stick to a more literal translation for their main Bible. I own several copies of the NIV. I use it in my study. But it is not my main Bible and not the one I preach from, for the reasons I’ve mentioned.

My recommendations would go with the King James Version, the New King James Version (which eliminates quite a bit of the archaic English of the earlier version, the American Standard Version (1901) and my personal favorite, the New American Standard Version.

These recommendations are not given to condemn any Bibles. But if you are going to use a particular one, you should understand its strengths and weaknesses.

At that we will bring this series on "God’s Word – the Bible" to a close. I hope you have gained some help in your own understanding of this, the word’s most remarkable and precious book.

If you are here with us today and you would like to know more about the Bible and the God of the Bible, we would be glad to offer assistance to you one a one on one basis. We also have printed manuscripts of the sermons in this series.

I’ll close with the words of President Woodrow Wilson:

Amen!

Footnotes: Please use your back button to return to your place.

1. R. Laird Harris, Can I Trust My Bible? (Chicago: Moody Press, 1963), p 124
2. Archer Gleason, A Survey of the Old Testament, Moody Press, Chicago, 1964, p. 19
3. Geisler, Norman L. and William E. Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible, Chicago, Moody Press, 1968, p. 308
4. Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1941, p. 23
5. History and Christianity, John Warwick Montgomery, Inter-Varsity Press, Downer’s Grove, Ill., p. 29

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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