I have a friend who is majoring in Ancient History. She swears that the bible people use today (yes, I know there are dozens of different versions, but most are very similar), is almost completely different than the original (oldest known) texts. I’m no expert, but I find this a little hard to believe. Granted, I’m sure there are multiple mistranslations/contradictions and I’m sure we have lost a few books, but I’'m sure the original texts arent that much different than modern bibles. What do yall think?
Hogwash. The King James Bible is fairly good, and modern scholarly versions are very, very good.
Translation from other languages is never exact. There will always be flaws. Some words in Greek simply don’t have cognates in English at all. Others have connotations.
But “almost completely different?” Not true.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls showed just how well our previously-oldest copies had been preserved. Very few differences.
Is she talking about scribal transmissions of the Hebrew and Greek texts, or the modern translations? It’s true that Christians tend to preserve errors in the Septuagint, because some of those made it into the gospels, and it’s also true that Jerome made choices of various possible meanings, and his choices tend to get preserved in popular translations, even though we now know that often he did not make the correct choice-- going with a literal translation instead of tracking down an idiom, for example.
There are also certainly scribal errors-- there are whole collections of rabbinical lore to explain why a word is spelled a different way in one place, and another way everywhere else, when it is really probably just a scribal error, but there are probably not scribal errors that change substantially entire narratives.
Now, if she is talking about deliberate redactions, yeah, we know that. Is she a college student who has just learned about redaction? Did she just learn about form criticism of the gospels, and the documentary hypothesis of the Torah (JEPD)? I’m glad she’s fired up, but it’s old news to people who took even a couple of religious studies classes in college.
Yeah, it’s like it’s in a whole nother language!
The surprising thing is how few differences there are.
Are there differences? Sure- sometimes small ones, sometimes more significant ones.
So, scholars can argue that the Gospel of Matthew actually said “Jesus was walking BY the water” rather than “Jesus was walking ON the water.”
On the other hand, no one can argue that the original Gospel said, “Jesus died, decomposed and was never heard from again” rather than that he rose from the dead.
If Jesus was walking ‘by’ the water, the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense. What did Peter sink into, if they were on land? And why would the rest of the disciples say Jesus was the Son of God just because they saw him walk on shore?
Regards,
Shodan
There were writings in the early Church that were claimed to be authentic (Third Letter to the Corinthians, Gospel of Thomas, etc.) Many scholars feel their authors drew from “authentic” works but added extraenous messages. They would be more or less popular in various offshoots of “official” Christian teaching.
However, the books in the Bible(s) Christians use today have been pretty consistent all along and I’d be interested in what parts of modern translations she thinks “are almost completely different” than what was being used in, say, the 2nd or 3rd cnetury.
The specific books that make up the Bible we have today probably haven’t changed much since early Christian times, but there were a whole lot of other Christian writings (i.e., allegedly about Jesus), including several different “gospels”, that were circulating amongst Christians in the first, second and third centuries AD,and that depicted Jesus (and his Apostles) and his nature and his deeds very differently from the books that eventually made it into the New Testament. These were once considered to be at least as authentic (by some self-identified Christians, at least) as the books that made it in to our current Bible. The present selection, the general agreement amongst Christians as to which texts about Jesus were really true and divinely inspired, and which make up the current New Testament, wasn’t arrived at until about 367 AD.
So yes, although the books of the current New Testament haven’t changed that much in their content since they were written in the first century, many of the other texts that early Christians regarded as just as holy and authoritative (or perhaps even more so in some cases) gave a very different picture of Jesus (and his Apostles, and other aspects of Christianity) from that which the modern New Testament does. I think this is what your friend probably means. Many early Christians were indeed working from a very different “Bible” from our present one (except that there was not any single Bible at all back then, before the 4th century, just lots of books about Jesus, each of which at least some Christians regarded as sacred).
Some of these ancient Christian sacred texts, that didn’t make it into the eventual Bible, have only been rediscovered, in ancient manuscripts, in relatively recent times. There may well be more yet to be discovered, and there were virtually certainly others that will remain lost forever, all copies long since destroyed.
Incidentally, even through most of the Middle Ages, when the question of which books were truly sacred and belonged in the “Bible” was long since mostly settled (at least within the Western, Catholic, church), Bibles rarely if ever existed as single volumes. Rather there would be individual volumes containing just one or a few biblical books. In the early middle ages, many poorer monasteries might have possessed no more, or little more, of the Bible than a copy of each of the four gospels (either bound separately, or as a single volume), and another volume of the Psalms. Most churches, apart from cathedrals, did not have even that. Indeed, it would not have been much use for them to have possessed such books, as, so I have read, most parish priests in that era were illiterate, or nearly so (as, of course, were nearly all of their parishioners). The Psalms, however, were important, and copies were relatively widely distributed, because they were used to be sung or recited in services. Only after the invention of printing did complete Bibles become relatively common.
Although what astonishes me is how very recent the “documentary hypothesis” is. Less than 200 years. Amazing it took that long before the application of detailed linguistic analysis.
If you’re wondering about biblical accuracy, I’d strongly recommend you read “Misquoting Jesus”.
The point is, the language is the same, and we know what is meant from context-- what happens next to Peter. If the rest of the story had somehow been lost, and it ended with “Jesus walked on/by the water,” there’d forever be a debate, and that is in fact what has happened with some other parts of scripture.
If it’s not clear to anyone, if I write, but don’t say “I was held up at work,” and give it no other context, the more reasonable assumption is that I was delayed, but it is also possible I was robbed at gunpoint, at work.
Sometimes translation errors happen when the more common-at-the-time meaning falls away, and the less common meaning sticks around, so that 500 years later, no one knows that “held up” used to mean “delayed,” and so the automatic assumption is that I must have been robbed at gunpoint at work. Lots of graduate theses are written about the influence of my violent workplace on my life and personality, before someone stumbles across a slang dictionary in a clay jar, and realizes that the worst thing that ever happened to me at work was that I was expected to do a little unpaid overtime.
Ok, according to her, the Greek language of today isnt quite the same as it was 2000 years ago (makes sense) and that its very hard to accurately decipher the scrolls. I, personally, have no idea. I cannot read Greek - neither modern nor ancient.
Again, I’m sure there are errors, but I don’t doubt that our version is pretty accurate.
We have contemporary Roman (Latin) translations of many ancient Greek texts, and other Latin translations of older Greek texts such as Plato. So we have a kind of “Rosetta Stone” to the Greek of the period.
Without translations like this, the job, today, would be a whole lot harder. But with this additional calibration, we have a pretty good idea of what ancient Greek writings mean.
From memory, I believe they were on a boat rather than the land. And that passage also contains a bit about Jesus successfully commanding a storm to abate, I believe, so that would make them think he was quite impressive. I wonder, if he was walking on the water, was he also clambering over the waves, which must have been considerable in a storm, as if they were sloped bits of ground? Or was he standing on a base level of the sea, while the waves just sort of splashed around him?
Different stories. One story involves Jesus walking on water to the boat in the middle of the lake (and the Peter getting out and walking too) and the other involves Jesus commanding the storm to stop.
For The New Testament, there are a lot of variations among the oldest surviving texts. As a percentage, not that much, but they add up.
The scribes of old had the annoying habit of “fixing” or “clarifying” the most argued about passages. So those are the most likely to have many variations.
Plus there were really sloppy about iotas. In just a couple centuries, the written Biblical Greek had become different enough from the Greek the scribes knew that they were getting confused. Seeing an unfamiliar word, replacing one vowel with another to make it familiar to them.
To read more, start learning about text types. Pick an old manuscript and start reading about the variations within it. E.g., here’s one codex and note the partial list of variations it contains.
I wouldn’t say “completely different”. Really close on average. But with key passages being in significant dispute.
I want (spiritually/divinely/insanely) lead (your choice), to research a psalm back to it’s roots. All the modern translations as I recall it come to:
God looks after all His people, from were you are, to the east to the west to the north to the south.
My research has revealed this: God looks after all His people, from the land you are in and all that the sun shines on (from it’s transit form east to west), and all those in the underworld (hell) and those yet to be born (of the sea - fluid existence, embryonic and fetal).