Comments from Pastor Billy about chapter twelve of his summer book recommendation - a great read for high school graduates and their parents!
I’m Being Told That Ancient Scribes Changed the Words of the New Testament Thousands of Times--Is That True? (Chapter 12)
“The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning”
F. F. Bruce
Michael Kruger begins this chapter by focusing on an argument he heard in college from his professor that he had never heard before. How unnerving it can be when we first hear a challenge to the faith that we had not considered yet? Doesn’t it cause us to doubt and wonder if maybe what we are believing in is a lie? Maybe we are not as solid in our faith or understanding? Kruger goes on to show how we can trust the witness we have through the thousands of manuscripts we have in our possession today.
One side of the debate comes from a New Testament Scholar and Textual Critic, Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is one of the foremost scholars on the New Testament manuscripts that we do have of the Bible. Ehrman is quoted as saying, “we don’t really have any book of the New Testament. All we have are copies of those books. In fact, we have only copies of copies of copies of copies,” and “that there were between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand differences--what are called textual variants” With this mountain of evidence against the reliability of the New Testament, and the entire Bible for that matter, how can we trust that what we carry around or are on our phones is really God’s word?
Well, there are always two sides, or more, to every piece of evidence. We all understand that the evidence we have for the New Testament is deep and wide. The manuscripts we have date back to around the 2nd Century. Also, if we think about how books were made, written by scribes by hand, we can understand that at some point spelling or word order may have been affected in some manuscripts. However, that does not mean we do not have enough evidence to have a certainty of what God wanted us to know. For instance, a common mistake in manuscripts is word order, “the use of the word, ‘the’ (the article with proper nouns in Greek does not affect the meaning).”
Now, there are two significant textual variants that often take people by surprise and may cause some to feel uneasy. The passages are John 8 and Mark 16. Both of these passages have a speckled tradition in the manuscripts and are often not found in many or even in the earliest manuscripts. Therefore, we have to look at the data we have, which is a lot, and determine if these readings are original. Part of the issue is that for many people these texts have been a part of the Christian tradition for years, and so to remove them, or put them in the footnotes, would be seen as problematic. However, most English translations do a nice job of putting these passages in italics or making a note that these are probably not original or in the earliest manuscripts.
In conclusion, we should remember what we know about God when it comes to the Bible. If God is who he says he is and wants us to be in relationship with him and know him better. If he has preserved the words that we are to have, then we should take confidence in all of the evidence and truth he has clearly given us. A final note to add is that in all of the slight variations and differences in the manuscripts,
“Not only are such unresolved variants very rare, but none of them determine a key doctrine or teaching of Scripture. No foundational truth is hanging on a passage with an unresolved variant.”
What an amazing truth that is!
In Christ,
Billy