Do we have accurate copies of the Bible?

Great Debates
1

An argument which is made repeatedly in these Great Debates, is the notion that the Bible can be, and has been changed numerous times throughout the centuries. The implication is that, even if it was originally a divine communication, it is now unreliable or corrupted. On that basis, some claim it can’t be appealed to as the “Word of God” or innerrant, or inspired in the sense of coming directly from God’s mouth to our ears.
In this thread I am undertaking with Tomndebb’s assistance what might seem to some to be the Herculean task of proving (yes, proving) that changing a book, epistle, phrase, or a even word of the Bible has been, and will alway be, absolutely impossible. And this proof can even be demonstrated by anyone by using their own computer. I want to start the thread using a statment from one of tomndebb’s (the moderator) recent posts. I recently posted a Bible quote and Tom challenged a word in the quote by saying:

" In the Greek, that phrase is:
“ou | gar | qelhmati | anqrwpou | hnecqh | pote | profhteia” (vB is not amenable to diacritical marks)
or
“not | for | by will | of man | was brought | ever | prophecy”
Every single extant version of the Greek manuscripts agree with this wording. (The Sinaiticus and some derivative texts change the order of pote profhteia to profhteia pote (which does not change k) and a single third century manuscript inserts the word “may be” before the phrase “ever prophecy.” In other words, you are claiming that I have “an interpretation” that is false when you have deliberately changed what was written.
Now, you may feel you have ample reason to change the words of the passage, based on your beliefs from the word “prophecy” to the word “scripture,” but you cannot claim that you have rendered the verse the way it was written and it is dishonest of you to make that claim. I am not reading some “commentary” or some “interpretation” I am reading the words that we have in every Greek manuscript available to us."

My premise in this thread is that the same appeal Tom made to our existing Bible manuscripts has existed from the instant that the very first copy of a book or epistle was created. It is done by simply comparing the copy with the original and verifying its accuracy. As more copies are created and distributed the original work becomes increasingly protected against change. Any variation from the original will be instantly exposed because of the existence and testimony of every accurate copy. When a mistake or change is introduced, the accurate copies reveal it instantly and Tom has quite eloquently shown how the process has worked for us from the very day of the original writing right up to our time. Further, while the original author of the writing was alive and copies were being produced and distributed, his personal testimony would also serve as a living and vocal witness against any mistakes or counterfeits. The writer’s living witness and the increasing number of accurate copies serve, from the very first day the work was made public, to make any successful change virtually impossible. Further, this would hold true for almost any written work but is especially true for writings that are considered special or holy. Greater quantities of those works are made, and extra care is always devoted to them. Considering it a holy calling, some gave their entire lives to producing numerous, accurate copies of the Bible. Each copy produced and distributed provided more assurance that the original writer’s work was protected from mistakes and counterfeits.

The proof of this can be performed at your own computer. When I posted my scripture quote, even I, the original writer, could never successfully retrieve it or change it, nor can anyone else. There were instantly thousands of copies in existence and no one can alter the original successfully. Although the ancient process of “posting” writings was slower than ours, the process was exactly the same. Further testimony about this process and the reliability of our Bibles was the discovery of the dead sea scrolls. These dated 10 centuries before any ancient manuscripts we had, and they are futher testimony that the copies of the Bible we have today remain unchanged from the original writings. The topic of translations and versions of the Bible is a related thread and should also be taken up in the future.

2

I think the more likely argument you’re going to hear on this board is that the first extant copies of the gospels we know of were written at least decades after the actual event, and therefore the accuracy of the very first copies as a transcription of what actually happened is already suspect.

3

you’re right that the discovery of the dead sea scrolls was a jaw-droppingly staggering thing, and I think that many people still haven’t grasped the enormity of what was found in those caves at Qumran. I still have problems processing it in my head.

However you don’t seem to address the fact that, in it’s early years, the Old Testament was an oral tradition and was never intended to be written down. Back then, writing either didn’t exist (not invented yet) or else was a rarified thing existing only in some places in the world and even then was only done by leaders (like pharoahs) on stone carvings etc.

Thus saying the bible is the inerrant word of God and arguing about exact translations is a bit iffy when it existed for hundreds (thousands?) of years merely in spoken form.

4

No question that such creations like the Documentary Theory and Q (and possibly some other capital letters) will be brought up. Most who try to make those theories hold water just wind up holding an empty bag. I guess I’ll just have to see if the thread gets some serious thoughts\discussions on the table. Most of those textual theories and arguing that a document must exist because of the way other documents were written is kind of like trying to jump on an imaginary airplane that’s going to a non-existent island. Stay in touch with the thread if you have some further input, I probably won’t make much commentary for awhile. There was a sudden death in the family today and I will probably be traveling.

5

Bible Man I’m glad you’re still here and willing to discuss. I do thinnk you missed a couple of key points.

1Even if we accept that the Bible is inspired where does it say that inspired equals inerrant? Keep in mind that since we’re talking about God’s will, Christian traition or individual reasoning isn’t good enough. Is there anything within this book you consider inerrant to clearly indicate that inspiration equals inerrant?

  1. What evidence do you have that it was ever the will of God that we have one final authoratative compilation of writings and then inspired writings would cease? Is there anyting in this inerrant book to indicate that?

  2. What evidence is there that the books that are in the Bible are the right ones, or the only ones we should consider? There is evidence within the Bible itself that there are other writings we don’t possess. How do we know they don’t contain crucial information? If they were discovered would we value them or dismiss them.

  3. Of all the writings available who decided which ones would be included and which ones would be left out?

For some of your arguement it will take someone with a lot more Biblical background than I to answer but I still have some concerns. Because of the other threads we weer discussing scripture in I started reading different versions on Bible Gateway{ an excellent site for bible study} I noticed that in different translations subtle word differences can make a big difference in meaning.

examples;
Philippians 2:5-7 (New International Version)
5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6Who, being in very natureGod,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

Philippians 2:5-7 (New King James Version)

5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, 7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.

In my opinion the difference between “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped”
and “did not consider it robbery to be equal with God” could be fairly significant.

The point is that several scholars might not interpret the exact same manuscript in the same way, and a subtle word change might mean a major doctrinal change.

6

Oh are you talking about the New Testament rather the the Old Testament? I thought you were referring to the bible as a whole. In any case the oral tradition thing still holds true even for the NT (in its first years). Jesus never told anyone to write anything down and most of his followers couldn’t have written it down anyway, even if they’d wanted to, since most people were illiterate.

We’ve done all that Q stuff about a gazillion times but I suppose you can’t search as a guest. Have you read the straight dope columns on who wrote the bible?

Sorry for the death in your family.

7

Sorry, fixed link:

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html

8

In general, I would agree that there seem to be several people who have a mistaken notion of the provenance of the books that were accepted as scripture, with odd claims that they were each revised and even re-written over hundreds of years before being frozen in a corrupted form in the fourth century. I have, on several occasions, pointed out the errors of that idea along with the potentially corrective actions that we can find by comparing the existing Greek to Syriac, Coptic, Latin, and other translations that date back to the same early periods.

Unfortunately, you seem to go too far in claiming that “our existing Bible manuscripts [have] existed from the instant that the very first copy of a book or epistle was created.” If this were true, we would not have all the polemics written regarding the Textus Receptus against the “challenges” of the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus and other majuscule texts. There are variants in the oldest copies we have of scripture. None of them are enough to justify a claim that the basic message has been changed and manipulated, but they are sufficient to indicate that we cannot claim to know with 100% certainty every word that had been written in the first century (for the New Testament) or earlier for the Hebrew Scriptures.

Regarding the latter, by the third century, C.E., several Jewish scholars reported inconsitencies and apparent corruptions in the Hebrew text. To address that issue, the Masoretes began a systematic attempt to create a perfect recension of the text, a task they completed by the tenth century. When the Qumran scrolls were discovered, comparisons showed that the Masoretes had done an outstanding job of creating a text that was nearly flawless when compared to the text that had existed 400 years before they began. Nearly. While many books are, line for line, identical to the Qumran scrolls, (Isaiah is, I believe, an example of such), there are several books in which entire passages differ, with the unanswered question being: did the Qumran community add to or delete from the “common” texts in order to provide special meanings for the (presumably Essene) theology or do the Qumran texts reveal the original texts that the Masoretes missed? (None of the disputed texts occur in any of the “major” works and none of the additional passages change Jewish theology in any significant way.)

So, while the idea that the “real” bible was “created by the church” in the fourth century is clearly false, it is no more accurate to pretend that we know exactly every word that was originally written in the books that were eventually accepted as scripture. Note that even when I challenged your substitution, I qualified it by pointing out that there were differences in the texts, but that none of the differences supported your substitution.

9

bible man said
““My premise in this thread is that the same appeal Tom made to our existing Bible manuscripts has existed from the instant that the very first copy of a book or epistle was created.””

I find it strange that there is no proper psysical description of jesus in the NT, which might suggest that some editing might have taken place. The only description of jesus comes from the apocrypha, and the church will have nothing to do with those.

10

Slight hijack:

Huh? There were a number of scripts around the world, most notably in that particular area, and the Hebrew alphabet for one wasn’t restricted to just the aristocracy.

11

p.s. I know that the New Testament wasn’t written in Hebrew. I was giving a local example of a script that was available to “the common person.”

12

Either:
-we have 100% accurate copies of the original texts and they were never perfect in the first place
-they started off as perfect and were corrupted over time
-they were flawed to begin with and have also been corrupted over time.

We can be sure of this because there are parts of the Bible that do not agree with other parts of the Bible, even though the same events are being described in both cases; perhaps the clearest of these is the comparison of 1 Chronicles 21 and 2 Samuel 24 - both describing a census of fighting men, but the Chronicles says it was Satan’s idea and that the count was reported back as 1,100,000 men (including 470,000 from the tribe of Judah), whereas Samuel says it was God’s idea and that the count was reported back as 800,000 men (including 500,000 from Judah).

Another one that isn’t so easy to see at first is the various gospel accounts of events immediately following the resurrection of Jesus; a plain reading of them leaves you with the impression that they are all highly consistent, but try to actually write down a timetable of events, including who went where, what they said and what they saw, in what sequence - it all turns into a bit of a mess.

None of this necessarily means that David never commissioned a census of his fighting men, or that Jesus was not resurrected, it just means that the Bible, as it currently stands, does not contain infallible accounts of these events.

13

…If that is the conclusion (and its very logical) than it makes sense that we cannot be assured of the bible being the ULTIMATE truth.
And since we only have the bible to tell us about christ (no other varification of miracles resurection etc) …

14

Don’t be shy…spit it out.

In fact, there are other writings about Christ other than the Bible but the facts are that we don’t know how accurate the gospels are in describing Christ. If are really honest, we don’t have any solid scientific evidence that Christ existed at all.

15

It means that whether (and how much) you believe is a matter of faith and personal inquiry; just like it would be with any other document. The existence of specific errors in the Bible is no more reason to discard the whole of it than the existence of specific truths in the Bible (and there certainly are some of those) is a reason to uncriticially accept the whole of it.

16

I grew up in a religious enviroment, and there wasnt a lot of space for free thinking, the questions were seen as doubts, so I stoped asking and allowed my faith to guide me (i was going to be a priest) until one day i saw in corinthians something that startled me.

Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

p.s. i concluded that faith was the many years of tutoring(for a better word) by my family, enviroment, teachers…if i was born in the jungles of papua new guinea I would have no faith to speak of…so faith is also a man made product.

17

Fair enough; not everybody has the same history as you though.

18

Nor are our ideas about cosmology, biogenesis, etc., the absolute, ultimate truth … they are simply the best explanations available for the range of data we have discovered. The quest for absolute truth is foredoomed to failure, because there are always new data becoming available that must be explained.

The Bible is (pace Bible Man) a collection of writings by Israelite writers (plus Luke and possibly a few others), of equal or better reliability than any other random ancient ethnic group’s collected writings, but not the dictation of a prolix and nitpicking deity.

Can it be relied on? To some extent. For example, the court history of King David is almost certainly accurate (if viewed through the eyes of a Yahwist moralist). The ethnology of Genesis 10-11 is almost certainly suspect. Etc.

But there are two issues I would like to address here:

  1. Even if the accuracy of Scripture is debatable, some definite conclusions can in fact be reached from it. We have information about Jesus, for example, from four Evangelists (Gospel writers, not preachers), along with incidental details included in a few letters. But the character depicted is reasonably clear. Exactly what His knowledge of supernatural matters might have been, or His own conception of His role (evolving, with Gethsemane a tough moral decision? certain from the first? or what?), is questionable. But one can be certain of some things: Jesus was never a legalist, though he did call for firm moral self-control from His followers. He was not an ethnic or sexual chauvinist, though raised in a culture that was. Depicting Jesus as a white supremacist, a nihilistic terrorist, etc., is a stroll through the absurd.

  2. The methodology used for textual criticism differs in very little from that used for the collected documentary evidence for most other ancient cultures. I have at times criticized Diogenes (and to his credit he has accepted that criticism graciously) for phrasing his comments as if the JEPD and Q source theories were absolutely proven, not merely the most probable explanations from the material at hand. It is therefore most reasonable to presume that they are accurate explanations, within the limits of their own capabilities, as scholarly experts are agreed in general principles, though in dispute on detail. But, as Bible Man suggests, none of this constitutes proof in some absolute sense.

However, the onus, IMO, is on him to prove that the verbatim inspiration/ traditional authorship theories are to be accepted over and above the modern theories, that God or Moses was so schizoid as to write two variant explanations of the Red Sea Crossing using different names and methodologies for God.

And I think that his claim to prove his assertions in the OP is where we need to go in this thread, not the defense of the modern theories against it. He said he’d prove it; let him.

19

Even if the books we have now are exact duplicates of the originals, it makes them no more convincing as history then if the Illiad, Epic of Gilgamesh or Beowulf were exact duplicates.

20

The oral tradition theory is contrary to what the Bible states in both the Old and New Testament (see verses below). Ultimately, to support\believe those arguments one has to take the position that both the Old and New Testament are complete fabrications from cover to cover (and some try to argue exactly that), there’s no in-between position. Additionally, just an objective view of history would never lead one to an oral traditon conclusion. That is, even those who make the “oral” argument will (usually) acknowledge from archaeology finds that the surrounding nations had writings that date up to 1500 years before the time of the Exodus. It’s illogical to think that the Hebrews were so backward that they were 15 centuries behind every other nation in developing a system of writing. Even if it were true, Moses himself was among the most educated in the Egyptian culture, he would have been more than capable of recording the awesome events that took place when God delivered the Hebrews from Egypt, as well as the details of the Covenant which followed.
Exodus24:4 “Moses wrote all the words of the Lord.”
John5:46 For if you believed in and relied on Moses, you would believe in and rely on Me, for he wrote about Me, But if you do not believe and trust his writings, how then will you believe and trust My teachings ?"
(There are many other supporting verses).

The Bible presents a homogenous message and it finally comes down whether one decides to believe it or not. Indeed, it’s either all true or it’s all false because it’s that well integrated. If it’s a fabrication, it would have to be a deception handed down by people through many generations and cultures who not only perpetrated a fraud but who also made it amzazingly well integrated. And since they usually received no earthly benefit for doing so, but instead usually received torture and death for their efforts, it really strains credulity to believe they did so for the purpose of perpetrating a fraud. Further, those who might engage in such gross deception don’t exhibit the kind of character that the Bible writers displayed (despite times of failure).