A Word from Pastor Kate
One of the questions I’m frequently asked is, “How can I trust the Bible when it’s been copied and translated so many times?” That is an excellent question! After all, if the Bible isn’t trustworthy, then everything we believe about Jesus is suspect. Allow me to put on my historian cap for a few moments and explain why we can be confident that the original words of the apostles have been reliably transmitted and translated for us, today.
The early church was eager to share the gospel message far and wide. Every time a Christian community received a letter or gospel, they made copies and then passed those copies on. We do not have the original letters of Paul, written in his own hand, or the first copy of any gospel, but we do have thousands of extremely early copies.
For most ancient source material there are very few extant manuscripts, and there are several hundred years (in some cases more than a thousand years) between the document’s composition and the oldest known manuscripts. For example, the Roman historian Tacitus lived during the first century (the same century the church formed). The oldest copies of his work date to the eleventh century. There are one thousand years between his original manuscripts and the oldest extant copies of his work. What’s more, we only have about twenty copies. And Tacitus is generally considered a reliable historical source.
Now, compare that to the New Testament. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were written between 40-100 CE. We have a partial manuscript dated to the year 130 CE. That’s less than a century! The oldest complete manuscript of the New Testament dates to 350 CE. That’s much earlier than similar ancient texts. Rather than the twenty copies of Tacitus’ history, the eight copies of Herodotus, or the ten copies of Julius Caesar’s history of the Gallic War, we have 5000 ancient copies in Greek, 10,000 ancient copies in Latin, and about 9,300 ancient copies in other languages. With all those ancient manuscripts, scholars can compare and contrast them to reconstruct the original writings with a high degree of accuracy. The process of reconstructing ancient writings is called textual criticism.
Furthermore, of all the textual variants (differences) between the text, scholars deem 99.8% of them meaningless. They consist of spelling and grammar errors, inversion of words (such as writing Christ Jesus instead of Jesus Christ). Of all textual variants, three are considered significant because of their length. They are the long ending of Mark’s Gospel, the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, and a single verse in the epistle of 1 John. They are all noted in our Bibles because they do not appear in the earliest manuscripts. Even with these three, significant variants, none of them impact essential Christian doctrine. This means we can be confident that the Bible’s we read are faithful renderings of the original words of the apostles!
Pastor Kate
