A common argument against the reliability and accurate transmission of the Bible is the Overzealous Monk argument. The argument is this: The Bible’s original manuscripts never actually had such consistency. It was edited to make it look consistent after the fact by the “latter community.” The best answer to this argument I have heard is from Voddie Baucham.
To summarize, Baucham points out one major issue with this argument: a manuscript problem. Last week, I wrote about how we have 66,000 copies of manuscripts or portions of manuscripts of the Bible. Baucham only references 6000, and he is pulling from old data and specifically talking about the New Testament. These manuscripts are written in three languages (Greek, Syriac, and Coptic), and the copies he was referencing span over 300 years. So these overzealous monks would have to go steal the manuscripts, change 6000 of them the same way, lie the same way in each language, don’t show inkwork in doing so, and get them back where they stole them from without getting caught. Then do the same thing with all the commentaries by church leaders, which quoted the New Testament so often we can reproduce all but 11 verses with these commentaries alone. Call up The Sting, Oceans Eleven, or James Bond; get your best heist people and see if they can pull that off.
In the movie Paul: Apostle of Christ, we see a plausible scenario for how the book of Acts came about. A very interesting thing they do at the very end of the movie is produce 100 copies of Acts to send out. Luke wrote his book, and the local body immediate made 100 copies of it so the church community throughout the Roman Empire could be encouraged. Was this exact fact? We don’t know. But I can say the movie was plausible. It is not like the books were written during the lifetime of the eye-witnesses and then they stayed stagnant for 300 years until Athanasius gave the first formal listing of the “Canon” in 367 AD. That’s not how it went down.
Peter recognized Paul’s letters as having the same weight and authority as the rest of established Scripture, so it is clear that the church knew these were not ordinary books but special books. In looking into the timing of when the churches got the letters, to the number of manuscripts and the languages they were translated into, this is a plausible scenario of how they came about. When the initial recipients got the books or letters we now know as the New Testament, they would have shared it around the local church community, but they would have made copies of these letters then and there and began sending the copies out, while the initial audience kept the originals. It happened very quickly.
Now some manuscripts were either retired, lost, or even discarded by unfriendly sources. Many of them were written on papyrus reeds, which have a very short lifespan. Some of these manuscripts were old and either illegible or tossed aside and were used in paper mache masks, found in Egypt. The reason Josh McDowell’s claim of 25,000 manuscripts in 1999 in The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict jumped to 66,000 manuscripts in 2016 is in part because we have found many manuscripts in these burial masks.
The translations went from Hebrew and Aramaic in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament into Syriac and Coptic first. Not long afterwards as Greek was dying as the common language in the Roman Empire, Jerome translated from the manuscripts he had available into the Latin Vulgate. It was translated into other languages too as time passed and Christians spread out to preach the Gospel. What’s more is that even though some numerical copying errors have been found, (such as Ahaziah’s age of 42 when he began to reign as recorded in 2 Chronicles, which is impossible, when he was actually 22 as recorded in 2 Kings), the translators refused to make the correction because they were doing everything they could to keep with what the copies of manuscripts they had said. So they KEPT the errors in there for the sake of accurate translation.
These facts make this overzealous monk idea utterly ridiculous. Last week I wrote about the copying process, which not just kills the telephone game argument, but it also kills this one too. The copying process was so meticulous this idea would have only been attempted by an individual or small group, and even then, they would not be able to get much done on it because guess what? All those 66,000 manuscripts agree within 95% or more of exact precision, and that 5% are mere variants which have nothing to do with the actual content.
I still would like to know who did this. No one who promotes this argument has ever given a face, a group name, or even a time frame in which this was done. Apparently it was the “latter community.” Where? When? How? I know exactly why there is no face: because the argument is simply made up. It never happened. The men and women who wrote, copied, and defended these books of the Bible, especially during the Roman Empire and during the days of the Roman Catholic Church’s Inquisitions gave their lives for these books. They died and refused to recant what the Scriptures taught, even under the penalty of death. If the Bible had been edited to “make it seem to fit,” why would anyone do this and why did no one who caved to the tortures give names to give credence to these stories? It does not make sense.
Here is another interesting aspect. The Bible has numerous details that APPEAR to contradict at first. Secularists love to point out the “thousands” of contradictions in the Bible, yet each one can be explained, which only makes the passages difficult, not a contradiction. If the Bible was edited to fit nicely by overzealous monks, wouldn’t these difficult passages be edited to sound better? Why did they leave that stuff behind? I will deal with how to deal with contradictions next week.
The Telephone Game and the Overzealous Monks arguments are frequently cited but never investigated by those who cite them. They merely repeat what they have heard from other skeptics and never actually do their homework on the topics. While the information about manuscripts, copying, and such is valuable, the arguments simply do not hold any water simply by analyzing what is required for it to happen. These skeptics want you to think they are smart, but they really are not. When your knowledge base is not rooted in the Word of God, no matter what level of education you have, it is foolishness. Stick with the Bible. It has withstood any challenge thrown at it and no matter what the skeptics say today, they will pass and the Bible will remain.
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