Biblical & Theological Issues

by Craig Branch –

One of the teaching techniques I employ with Christians is to role play with the students. It helps to create a more realistic encounter with a skeptic, and it creates insecurity within the students and thus a better learning environment. For example, I ask, “Do you believe the Bible you hold is the inspired, infallible and inerrant word of God?” Invariably everyone responds affirmatively. But then I point out that there are many different Bible versions available. These include the King James Version, the New King James Version, the English Standard Version, the New American Standard, the New Living Translation, the New International Version, and the list goes on and on.

These translations are generally in agreement, but there are some significant differences. In addition to some differing interpretations, I point out some obvious errors in the text. For example, in the King James Version, 1 John 5:7 reads, “For there are three that bear witness in heaven – the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.” This would be a great verse to support the doctrine of the Trinity, but no other translation contains that passage.

Back to the role play. I then point out two of several apparent discrepancies (errors) in passages. In 2 Samuel 8:4, David captured 1,700 horsemen from Hadadezer’s army; yet in 1 Chronicles 18:4 David captured 7000 horsemen. In 1 Kings 4:26 Solomon had 40,000 stalls of horses while 2 Chronicles 9:25 says he had only 4000 stalls of horses.

Valid responses to these challenges to the inerrancy of Scripture are that (1) Translations depend on the expertise and perspective of the translators; (2) that the later the manuscripts used for translation, the more probable it is for copyist errors to creep into the text. The latter response answers the King James Version of 1 John 5:7 problem¹ as well as the numerical discrepancies in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.²

We have covered other challenges to the authority of the Bible in previous issues of Areopagus Journal which you are encouraged to obtain. ³ But the question we are raising here has to do with the transmission of the biblical text. In ancient times, before the invention of the printing press, books had to be copied by hand. It is not uncommon for copyists to make mistakes (misspell words, transpose letters or words, omit words, duplicate words, etc.). This fact helps us understand some of the discrepancies we see in the Bible like those noted above. They can be accounted for by appealing to copyist errors.

Back to the role play. Remember the original question, “Do you believe the Bible you hold is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant word of God?” After letting the students squirm for a while, I tell them, “You need to be more precise in what you think about the nature of the Bible and affirm what major evangelical scholarly societies have affirmed, namely, that the Bible is inerrant in the original texts (autographs). We believe that the authors of the Bible (Moses, David, Isaiah, Matthew, Paul, etc.) were divinely inspired to write what they wrote, and therefore wrote inerrantly. However, it is not necessarily the case that those who copied the biblical books were inerrant.”⁴

Everyone nods their heads, some with a sigh of relief. But I don’t stop there. I then ask, “But do we have the original manuscripts?” The answer in no. So I ask, “How, then, can we say that we know what the original text says? Is that not just a blind faith assumption or wishful thinking?” Put another way, how can we be sure that the original words written by the original authors of the Bible haven’t been hopelessly corrupted so that their original meaning is unrecognizable?

The Charge of Textual Corruption

Answering these questions is important, not only for the personal edification of believers, but also because two major false religions argue against Christianity and in favor of their “new revelations” precisely on the grounds of the Bible’s alleged transmissional corruption. Muslims, for one, claim that the Qur’an contains the same message as the Jewish Torah and the New Testament gospels. Yet, when asked about the numerous places where the Qur’an flatly contradicts the Bible, the Muslim reply is that the Biblical text has been corrupted in the copying process. The same claim is made by Mormons in support of the Book of Mormon over the Bible. The Bible is accepted by Mormons as authoritative only insofar as it has been accurately transmitted. Of course, where the Bible and the Book of Mormon conflict, the Bible’s text must be corrupted.

Additionally, the charge of Bible’s corruption has more recently become a favorite of some secular skeptics. One such skeptic is Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. A popular writer whose books and appearances receive much coverage from the liberal media, Ehrman began his career as a conservative, graduating from Moody Bible Institute and earning a Master’s at Wheaton College. When he went to the liberal Princeton Theological Seminary, his views began to change. He began to question, “Do you mean that for all those centuries before the King James translators got the work, Christians did not have access to God’s word? What was God thinking…. What does one do with the fact that we don’t have the original Hebrew and Greek texts of any of the books of the Bible, but only later copies of these texts, all of which have mistakes?”

Ehrman goes on to justify his apostasy, “At Moody I had been taught that the inspired words were the words of the originals, the so-called autographs…. [E]ventually this view came to be problematic to me. Why would God have inspired the words of the Bible if he chose not to preserve these words for posterity?”⁵ Ehrman claims that we only have error-ridden copies and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals with thousands of differences. He notes that when a scribe alters the text, either accidentally or intentionally, those changes are permanent. Future scribes just add on to these mistakes and the problems are compounded for centuries.

In This Issue

These charges are not new. They have been repeatedly and thoroughly rebutted and corrected by scholars. This issue of Areopagus Journal provides an introduction to the scholarly consensus on the textual transmission of the Bible. It addresses the question of how we can know that we have what the biblical writers originally wrote. We desire to make the reader aware the sophisticated academic work done in determining which texts are reflective of the originals.

The academic discipline that addresses these issues is called textual criticism. This science involves a rigorous process that seeks to recover the original autographs of an ancient book. Most Christians are unaware that most textual critics are very optimistic regarding the text of the Bible despite the charges of Muslims, Mormons, and skeptics. The articles in this journal are designed to show why.

In the introductory article, “How Do We Know That We Have What the Biblical Writers Originally Wrote?,” Paul Wegner presents a good summary of the process of textual criticism and how we can be certain that what we have today is virtually the inerrant word of God.

One of the largest variants in the New Testament is the ending of Mark Gospel (16:9-20). You may have noticed in newer translations there is almost always a footnote pointing out that these verses are not found in the earliest manuscripts. But the overwhelming majority of manuscripts include these verses. So did Mark write these words or not? Snake handling sects in Sand Mountain, Alabama sure believe they are God’s authoritative word (vv. 17-18), as do cults that insist on the need to be baptized in order to be saved (v. 16). Matt Aernie contributes the article, “Subtracting from God’s Word? The Longer Ending of Mark.” He shows that the best evidence is that these verses are not original to Mark.

Another issue related to the transmission of the biblical text is the claim of some Christians that the original King James Version is the only correct version of the Bible. ARC’s Kansas City Director, Keith Gibson, responds to this well-intentioned but misguided view in his article, “The King James Only Movement: Fighting the Right Battle in the Wrong Place.”

In addition to reading these articles in Areopagus Journal, I encourage you to read the recommended books listed elsewhere in this issue. Especially recommended is the thorough and balanced work, The Text of the New Testament by late Princeton scholar, Bruce Metzger.

Craig Branch is the Director of the Apologetics Resource Center, Birmingham, Alabama.

NOTES
¹ The entry of this passage did not occur until Erasmus’
1516 translation without any textual support. It was actually copied from another translation, the Latin Vulgate, and became part of the so-called Textus Receptus from which the King James Version was translated in 1611. See Keith Gibson’s article “The King James Only Movement” in this issue of Areopagus Journal; Bruce Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3^rd Edition (Oxford University Press, 1992), 100; and D.A. Carson’s The King James Version Debate (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1979), 34-36.
² See Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983); and Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, The Big Book of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 171, 181.
³ See the January 2002, Nov./Dec. 2005, and Nov./ Dec. 2007 issues.
⁴ An excellent summary statement of the church’s historic view on the connection of inerrancy to the autographs is found here in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (Article X):

WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.

⁵ Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 181-182.

(First published in Areopagus Journal Vol. 9 No. 4 – Do We Have the Right Text?)