Answer for yourself: After 2,000 years of transmission and translation, does the New Testament accurately convey the meaning of the original authors and the truth as known and accepted by Yeshua and his hearers?
We have about 5,000 Greek manuscripts that contain at least a "portion" of the New Testament, but in many places, they do not agree exactly on wording. And most of the earliest copies are 100 to 200 years later than the originals. From a historical perspective, how accurately does the modern Bible reflect the content of the original manuscripts?
For most of its long history, the Bible was copied by hand. You may be wondering how easy was it for a mistake to enter into this process? Whenever something is copied by hand, frailties of human eyesight enter in, particularly if that document is old and some ink has faded. Copying is also long, tedious work. It would take a scribe several months to copy just one Gospel. In some secular Greek manuscripts, scribes left a note at the end that indicates the patient labor involved: "As the traveler rejoices to see the home country, so the scribe rejoices to see the end of a manuscript!"
The invention of eyeglasses around 1375 certainly helped reduce the number of mistakes. And the invention of printing with movable type in 1456 assured production of duplicate copies. But prior to that, for over a thousand years, everything was done by hand, and the more times an ancient text was copied, the more chance for errors to creep in.
That brings us to another question: How reliable are the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts we have today? The earlier copies are generally closer to the wording of the originals. The translators of the 1611 King James Bible, for instance, used Greek and Hebrew manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the number of changes since the first century is anyone's guess.
Today Bible translators have access to Greek manuscripts from the third and fourth centuries and Hebrew manuscripts from the era of Jesus. In other words, today we have access to "better" manuscripts than that were used by the editors of the King James Bible in 1611. Let that sink in a minute!
We even have the Rylands Papyrus, just a torn page with a few verses from John 18, that we can date between C.E. 100 and 150. So today we have access to a text of the Old and New Testaments that is more basic, more fundamental, less open to charges of scribal error or change.
Since manuscripts rarely have dates on them, we must judge the date by the handwriting. Handwriting styles differ with the times. So we compare the handwriting of a manuscript with that of deeds and bills of sale and other documents that do include dates which archeologist have provided for us through their excavations. In addition, sometimes a scribal note in the margin or on the dedication page gives away the period in which the manuscript was copied.
Most of the earliest surviving New Testament manuscripts are 100 to 200 years later than the originals. By contrast, our copies of other ancient writings, like those of Virgil or Homer, are often many hundreds of years later than their originals. In some of those writings, we have only one copy! The New Testament, on the other hand, has many copies.
Of more importance is that of all the manuscripts discovered, some passages have been affected by scribal changes. For example, take Mark 9:29. Jesus is explaining how he was able to cast out a demon, and in the earliest manuscripts, he is quoted as saying, "This kind can come out only by prayer." In the Greek manuscripts the KJV translators used, the two words "and fasting" are tacked on. I wish I could say this is the extent of such deception but it is not. Thus the need for our websites in hopes of waring and teaching others about the problems surrounding their "inspired" texts which they trust for their faith and practice.
By studying manuscript history, we see that the words "and fasting" were inserted between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. These were the years of the "desert" Catholic fathers and the birth of monasticism (Monks). The number of official fast days was increasing, and the regimens of fasting were becoming more strict. Probably a devout scribe, himself part of a fasting tradition, believed that Jesus must have meant to include "and fasting," so he included the two words.
Some Bibles list three endings for the Gospel of Mark. The earliest Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Latin manuscripts end the Gospel of Mark at 16:8: "The women said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." That does not sound like an appropriate ending for a book of good news, so some early scribes, undertaking their own research, added what they thought would be appropriate endings. A few later manuscripts add just two or three verses to this abrupt ending, but most contain a longer ending, what we now number as verses 9 to 20. We can tell by examining the vocabulary that these endings were not written by Mark. So translators often put them in brackets or as a long footnote.
Why not just keep them out of the Bible? Yet many translators consider verses 9 through 20 to be a legitimate part of the New Testament.
In the third and fourth centuries, when Gentile Catholic church fathers were deciding which books should be included in the New Testament, these verses were already in the copies of Mark that most of them were using. In other words, some in the early church considered verses 9 through 20 to be a credible account of the Resurrection. Though these verses were not written by Mark, many believe we have here a fifth evangelical witness to the resurrection of Jesus. I'll let you judge that for yourself.
The tragic result of these additions by monks is that well-meaning, God-fearing believers have misinterpreted passages added to their Bibles that should have never been there. If you will read these passages for yourself, you will see how multitudes have died, and many still die as they drink deadly poisons and handle rattlesnakes to demonstrate their faith for God.
By the year 600, the Gospels had been translated into only eight languages. By the time of the Reformation, there were Bibles or portions of it translated into only 33 languages--out of a total of about 6,000 languages! It is discouraging to see how slow the church was in providing translations of the Holy Scriptures.
Not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the expansion of the Protestant missionary movement, has the Bible been translated into more dialects. According to the American Bible Society, at the end of 1993, the entire Bible has been translated into 329 languages, and at least one book of it has been translated into 2,009 languages. That means, of course, that a good many languages still lack even one book of the Bible.
On the other hand, since 85 percent of the world speaks one of these 2,009 languages, the vast majority of people have access to at least one book. The Wycliffe Bible Translators and others have done wonderful work in reducing many languages to written form and then translating the Bible into them. In terms of the English Bible, it seems that the last few decades have been extraordinary years of translation. Between 1952, when the Revised Standard Version came out, and 1990, when the New RSV came out, there were 27 complete translations of the Bible in English published, plus another 25 New Testament translations--all within 38 years. That is unprecedented in the history of translation.
Part of this flurry of translation activity is related to manuscript discoveries; when we discover still more ancient biblical manuscripts or ancient secular manuscripts that shed light on ancient languages, people naturally want that information reflected in their Bibles. Sadly, when presented with facts that challenge false-faith, too few repent of the errors of their beliefs and fail to accept the higher truths.
With this heightened translation in the last century, many different religious groups--Roman Catholics, moderate and conservative Protestants, and Jews--have each wanted their own translations. This is partly due to the economic factor: the Bible is a best-seller, so many publishing companies have been inclined to sponsor and publish new versions.
Answer for yourself: With so many Bible translations available, are English-speaking people more biblically literate than in the past? I am not sure. In the first 1,500 years of the church's history, literacy was low, and there were not many copies of the Scriptures available to read. Of the 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament now available, only 59 have all 27 books. That means that few congregations, and far fewer individuals, had access to all of the New Testament, let alone the whole Bible.
Today we live in a culture of relatively high literacy, but we also have many, many newspapers, magazines, and books to read. In addition, radio, television, and the movies are a major distraction from reading. In some ways, then, people who can read probably are not as familiar with the Bible as those who could read in previous eras. Let this fact settle in for a moment!
Now before I part a most alarming fact that never ceases to alarm and stagger the typical Christian once he come to an understanding of what is actually being said. The following is quoted from "Text, NT," from the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, 2nd edition, (Abingdon, 1962), p. 595-598:
"A study of 150 Greek MSS (manuscripts) of the Gospel of Luke has revealed more than 30,000 different readings...It is safe to say that there is not one sentence in the NT in which the MS (manuscript) tradition is wholly uniform...But there are many thousands which have a definite effect upon the meaning of the text...It is equally true that many of them do have theological significance and were introduced into the text intentionally...Many thousands of variants which are found in the MSS of the NT were put there deliberately. They are not merely the result of error or of careless handling of the text. Many were created for theological or dogmatic reasons. It is because the books of the NT are religious books, sacred books, canonical books, that they were changed to conform to what the copyist believed to be the true reading. His interest was not in the "original reading" but in the "true reading"- as perceived by the Roman goyim (Gentiles), Christian redactors, or course".
After reading this maybe you may be more serious about your study of the documents you rely upon for your faith and practice, especially in light of the fact that Yeshua is a Jew and the early faith for the church and followers of Yeshua was Biblical Judaism where the non-Jew was grafted into Israel and was partaker of the root and fatness of the Olive Tree of Israel and not as we see today.....a replacement religion bent upon the conversion of every Jew in hopes of obliterating the faith and religion of Yeshua. Only God knows the complete story of the additions and deletions contained in the New Testament and sadly 2.5 billion "believers" follow such a document unquestioningly.
More to follow.