2. You Can Trust the Words

It has been reported that the editor of a leading religious journal once received this inquiry and comment concerning the Revised Standard Version and its publisher, Thomas Nelson and Sons:

"Who is this Tom Nelson that has just put out a new Bible? I much prefer the one written by the apostle James!"

The truth of the matter is, of course, that Paul wrote not in English but Greek, the common language of his day. The books of the Old Testament were written almost entirely in Hebrew, with certain portions–mainly in Daniel and Ezra–in Aramaic.

The first Hebrew words of the book of Genesis, as they appear in modern printings, look like this:

[A sample of Hebrew text follows, with interlinear English.]

earth the and heavens the God created beginning in

The Aramaic part of Daniel begins in chapter 2, verse 4, where "the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic," Here is the first phrase:

[A sample of Aramaic text follows, with interlinear English.]

live ever for king O

As you can see, Hebrew and Aramaic are very closely related.

The first Greek words of John 3:16 ,as printed in a modern Bible, look like this:

[A sample of Greek text follows with interlinear English.]

So for loved the God the world

Since Greek and English both belong to the same family of languages, they have much in common. Many English words obviously show their direct descent from the Greek. As I pick up my Greek New Testament and begin reading the first few verses of the Gospel of John, I immediately find dozens of words that have been carried over into English.

Here on the very first line, using English letters, is arche, meaning "beginning," the source of our English word "archaic." An archbishop is the "first" or "leading" bishop.

Three words later comes logos, meaning "a word," "a saying," "a teaching," Put arche and logos together and you have "archeology," the science of beginnings, the study of antiquity.

On the second line I see theos, meaning "God," the source of our "theist," a believer in God. Add this to logos and you have "theology," the science or study of God.

The great majority of medical terms are derived from the Greek. In fact, some medical educators are recommending Greek as the most useful language for the study of medicine. Many medical students in my classes chose Greek as their college language. Now they find themselves at a considerable advantage in learning the vast and complicated language of modern medicine.

Right here in the first few verses of John I see zoe, meaning "life," which turns up in our English word "zoo." Put this with logos and you have "zoology," the study of animals.

A few lines down is haima, meaning "blood," from which we get "hemoglobin" and "hemorrhage."

You can imagine what an encouragement it is to the beginning Greek student to find so many familiar sights and sounds in the original wording of the New Testament.

The same cannot be said of the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. To begin with, they are written from right to left–which, as a popular musical has observed, is "absolutely frightening!"

It does help a little to discover that there are some interesting similarities between the Hebrew, Greek and English alphabets.

The first two letters in Greek are alpha, beta, the equivalent of our a, b. When you pronounce the word "alphabet," you have begun to repeat the Greek letters.

The first two letters in Hebrew are 'aleph, beth. Evidently the alphabets of the languages of the Bible are to be traced to some earlier common source.

Few words have been taken directly from Hebrew into English, and for some time the beginning student finds himself lost in a very foreign tongue. But if he persists, he later discovers that in many respects Hebrew and Aramaic are less difficult to learn than Greek.

The original copies of the Bible were all "manuscripts." That is to say, they were all written out by hand. The invention of printing was still far in the future.

Most of these documents were probably written on such material as leather, vellum, or papyrus–a rather perishable substance made from the stem of the papyrus plant.

Not one of the original manuscripts of the Bible is known to exist. It is most likely that all of them, through age and use, have long since crumbled and disappeared.

This might seem a serious loss. But in actuality no other ancient book has been so well preserved as the Bible. Through the centuries devout men undertook the arduous task of copying and recopying the ancient Bible manuscripts. Today there are hundreds and thousands of these documents in the libraries and museums of the world.

No word or letter could be written from memory. The scribe must look attentively at each individual word and pronounce it before writing it down.

As a final precaution against any possible errors, the Masoretes even counted the verses, words, and letters of each section. If these counts did not tally in the newly made copies, the work was discarded.

Not all Bible manuscripts, however, were produced with such extraordinary care and accuracy. Consequently, not all copies of the Bible in the original languages read exactly alike. In fact, the total number of variations between the manuscripts runs into many thousands.

Like the loss of the original manuscripts, the existence of so many variants might seem to be a serious dilemma. On the contrary, there is such ample evidence available for the reconstruction of the original wording of both the Old and New Testaments that it can be safely affirmed that in substance the text of the Bible is certain.

The late Sir Frederic Kenyon, one-time director of the British Museum and a man uniquely qualified by a lifetime of experience with Bible manuscripts to speak with authority on this problem, has given this assurance in his widely read book Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts:

"The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries."

The most famous Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament are the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. They are also by far the oldest, dating back to the time of Christ and earlier. And the wording of these manuscripts, though they were copied so many centuries before the Masoretes began their careful work, shows no variations of any consequence from the so-called "Masoretic text."

Perhaps the most famous of all the Greek Bible manuscripts is the Codex Sinaiticus. "Codex" means "book" and indicates that the Sinaiticus was not rolled up as a scroll like the ancient Hebrew manuscripts but was bound in sheets like a modern book.

This invaluable manuscript of almost the entire Greek Bible was named after Mount Sinai where it was discovered in 1844 in a monastery library by the German scholar Tischendorf. In 1860 it was sent by the monks to the Czar of Russia at Saint Petersburg, where it was kept until 1933.

I still recall as a boy some of the excitement in England when it was decided to purchase the Codex from Russia. Everybody was asked to share in the venture. Solicitors went from home to home collecting contributions toward the half-million-dollar price.

When the Codex arrived in London, crowds flocked to the British Museum to view this fourth-century copy of the Bible. It can still be seen there today, along with many other important manuscripts, all of them offering their testimony to the accurate preservation of the Biblical text.

While Greek was understood practically everywhere throughout the Roman world, early Christian missionaries found it necessary to translate the Scriptures into the native languages of the peoples they sought to convert.

After Greek, the most important language of the Roman Empire was Latin. Probably soon after the middle of the second century, the first Latin version appeared. More than fifty copies of this early Latin Bible are still in existence today.

As copies of the Latin version were multiplied, it was inevitable that variations should creep in. Near the end of the fourth century the great scholar Jerome was asked by Pope Damasus to prepare a revision of the Latin Bible that could stand as the official version of the church.

Thus was produced the Latin Vulgate, the standard Bible of western Christendom throughout the Middle Ages.

It was copied and recopied thousands of times. Today it is estimated that there are in Europe alone more than 8,000 copies of this version.

As Christianity spread to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and even beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, the Bible was translated into many other languages. Copies of these early translations are a valuable aid in recovering the original wording of the Scriptures.

During the early centuries Christian leaders made frequent references to the Bible, quoting it in the forms in which it was available to them in their day. Many of these quotations are earlier than the oldest manuscripts, thus making these so-called "Patristic quotations" very valuable in the search for the original Biblical wording.

The science and technique of analyzing these innumerable sources in so many different languages is known as "textual criticism." This is "lower" rather than "higher" criticism. Higher criticism is concerned with such questions as, Who wrote the book? When, why, to whom, and under what circumstances did he write it?

The purpose of lower criticism is solely the recovery of the wording of the original manuscripts.

Textual criticism recognizes the inevitability of errors creeping into handwritten documents. Have you ever tried copying a lengthy article by hand? Did it turn out perfect?

Imagine the increased difficulty of copying the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. There were no chapters, no verses, no punctuation, not even any separation between the words?

How would you read the phrase, GODISNOWHERE? God is nowhere? Or, God is now here?

In the earlier Hebrew there weren't even any vowels. If you saw only the consonants MR, would it mean "mare," "more," "mere," or none of these?

Sometimes a scribe would see or hear one word and write another just like it. This probably explains the variant in Revelation 22:14.

The manuscripts used by the King James Version read, "Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life." Other manuscripts, such as the earlier copies preferred by the Revised Standard Version, teach that the blessed ones are "those who wash their robes."

For this change the Revised Standard Version was accused of minimizing the importance of keeping God's commandments. But textual criticism understands how innocently such a variant could have developed in the later manuscripts. Notice how much alike the two phrases are when written in Greek, but using English letters to show the similarity of sound as well as appearance.

HOI POIOUNTES TAS ENTOLAS AUTOU, meaning "those who do His commandments."

HOI PLUNONTES TAS STOLAS AUTON, meaning "those who wash their robes."

To a careless or drowsy eye or ear these two lines look and sound almost the same. How easily a scribe could have seen or heard the less familiar words of line two and written down the words of line one!

Since "wash their robes" is the more difficult reading, and since it is the reading found in the earlier manuscripts, it is only honest scholarship for the textual critic to recommend to modern translators that they adopt this wording in their versions of the New Testament.

As far as the keeping of God's commandments is concerned, there are plenty of other verses that urge this Christian duty, especially in the book of Revelation itself. See Revelation 12:17; 14:12.

The translators of the great English Bibles of the sixteenth century, including the King James Version, had available to them only a small fraction of the immense collection of Biblical sources so conveniently at hand today.

What is so remarkable–and so very reassuring–is that with all the vast increase in our knowledge of the history and transmission of the Bible text, so few changes have been required.

Each year I have watched the same reaction in my class in New Testament criticism. For the first few weeks students will express their concern, even dismay at the host of variants they are finding in the manuscripts. How can one trust a book built on such questionable support?

But before the course is over, the same once-troubled students are always able to report that an honest look at all the problems–set against the background of the mass of available evidence and viewed with the practiced eye of a textual critic–has served to increase rather than decrease their confidence in the Bible. God did not give us His Word to have it lost in the manuscripts and versions.

It is true that there are innumerable errors in the manuscripts. How natural to it is to find them there! How interesting it is to compare them! Competent scholarship is able to recognize and correct them. The few that are still the subject of debate only add interest to the study of the text. They pose no threat to the overall meaning of the Scriptures.

Consider, for example, one of the most important textual variants, the story of the woman taken in adultery.

The older English versions, such as the King James, have this story in John 7:53 to 8:11. This is where it is placed in a number of the Greek manuscripts.

But other manuscripts place the account at the end of the Gospel of John. Still others have it in Luke. Many omit it entirely.

It is not a question of the genuineness of the story. Repeated scholars have expressed the opinion that the account bears all the marks of being true. The uncertainty is only concerning its position in the bible. This is why modern English versions place the story in the margin or after chapter twenty-one.

A recent article in a popular American magazine has suggested that modern research among the ancient manuscripts of the Bible shows that actually we are quite uncertain about the authenticity of a large share of the Biblical text. The writer referred particularly to an enormous research project now in progress on both sides of the Atlantic, with headquarters at Oxford University and the Southern California School of Theology.

The purpose of this vast endeavor is to recheck completely the sources of the New Testament text in the thousands of Greek manuscripts, the early versions, and the writings of the early fathers of the church. I have watched friends of mine at work on this project–and very tedious but thorough work it is.

After more than fifteen years of labor, the first volume of this international critical text of the Greek New Testament is soon to be published. The results will hardly be those mentioned in the magazine article, but rather they will provide further evidence of the remarkable preservations of the Scriptural text.

Meanwhile, the united Bible Societies of America, Scotland, Wüttemberg, and the Netherlands have just published a critical edition of the Greek New Testament "specially adapted to the requirements of Bible translators throughout the world." In a most convenient form the more important variations in the Greek text are listed in the footnotes, together with the available evidence supporting each different reading.

I wish all could read these footnotes, see the nature of the variants, and sense the candor with which the problems have been spread out on the page. No secrets here. Just an honest desire to reproduce the wording of the Bible documents with ever greater accuracy–down to the last detail.

I wish everyone could take each listed variant and try it out in the printed text above. Ask yourself if any of these could possibly affect in a significant way the consistent witness of the Scriptures to the truth about God.

For all practical purposes we have in our possession the books of the Bible as they were originally written.

–A Graham Maxwell, excerpt from You Can Trust the Bible © 1967, Pacific Press Publishing Association.