There are many scholarly critics, especially in the universities who love to impress upon new freshmen that the Bible has long been antiquated and completely untrustworthy. They have three favorite arguments which I have heard numerous times, yet all fall flat. I will address one today and the other two in the next two weeks. The professors who speak of these have not studied the issues themselves and a simple examination of how the Bible got here easily refutes such notions.
The first argument is like the “telephone game.” The argument states that the Bible was copied and copied and copied and translated and translated and translated so many times that we actually do not know what the original text said. In the telephone game, you get people in a line or a circle, one person gets a word or phrase and passes it on to the next person who gets the message and passes it on as well. Eventually by the end of the line or circle, the last person’s message seems to have little to no resemblance to the original word or phrase. Therefore, the argument states that the Bible cannot be trusted because we don’t have the same message it started with. The skeptics also tend to speak of oral traditions in the same way.
To this notion I laugh, because it is not a well-researched claim. First let’s dig into the nature of the telephone game analogy. In the telephone game, there are two details about the game which fail to apply to both oral traditions and to the Bible. First, we are not in an oral tradition society where our brains are trained to retain things we hear orally. In societies where their stories are passed down orally, they have excellent memories on the topic, rehearsing them over and over again until they are memorized. Also, what needs to be memorized is often put into a mnemonic structure, usually with rhymes or song, to help with the memorization.
The other detail is that in the telephone game, you can’t ask what the phrase was a second time. There is no way to validate what you heard. If you were trying to pass on information and all you had was an oral passing, would it not be wise to hear the message twice, repeat it, and make sure you got it right? The telephone game does not allow for this. But the Bible was not merely passed on orally. It was written. So anyone who heard Scripture could go to the text and validate what they heard. That is what the Bereans did with Paul and Silas and Luke praised them for it.
But now let’s get to the meat of the claim: the copying and translation aspect. The telephone game fails to account for this as well. The primary claim here is that the Bible went from one manuscript to another manuscript to another manuscript to another manuscript (again, without verification) and due to copying errors, the current manuscripts have no relation to what was originally written. That’s the argument. However, the only Bibles I know of which would remotely make this claim are the paraphrases such as The Message (I personally consider them commentaries, not versions). Each of the versions (KJV, NKJV, NIV, ESV, etc.) go back to the manuscripts in the original languages to get the most accurate translation in the modern language we can get. I will address the versions debate in three weeks.
The copying process itself was very intricate and detailed; it was not a casual process. Josh McDowell does a great job at describing this process in his books The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict and God-Breathed. I am just going to highlight a few of the points. The parchment, pen, and ink each had to come from specific sources and be prepared in certain manners. They could not use just whatever they wanted. Each sheet for the scroll was cut to exact sizes and then lined and columned. Each letter had to be written with a specific spacing and size range, and each line had to contain a certain number of letters. Each line and column would be numbered so if a mistake was made, the scribes could pinpoint precisely which letter was off by this system alone.
The name of God was treated with such reverence that the scribe would stop on the word before saying the Lord’s name, go cleanse himself, and prepare a new pen and ink well. He would write the word prior to the Lord’s name so the ink would not blot, and then write the name of God. If a single error was made on this name, the entire page of the scroll had to be burned and start over. Then to top it off, before a copy of the Scriptures was considered a valid copy, the manuscript had be carefully inspected letter by letter, a process which often took about three years. No other ancient book, written by hand, on perishable material, went through this kind of process.
Now, have errors been introduced into the copying process? Yes. They are called variants. But there is more to this claim than that. What kind of errors are they? Spelling and grammar, number disagreements, pronoun use (exchanging “The Lord” for “He”), and the like. Not a single variation found had anything to do with the actual content of what was being said. Look at this quote regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"Once the Dead Sea Scrolls were translated and compared with modern versions of the Hebrew Bible, the text proved to be identical, word for word, in more than 95% of the cases. (The 5 percent deviation consists of mainly spelling variations. For example, of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, only 17 letters are in question. Of those, ten are a matter of spelling, and four are stylistic differences; the remaining three letters comprise the word light, which was added to Isaiah 53:11.)"
~Josh McDowell, God-Breathed, pg 154-155
“But there are thousands upon thousands of these variations.” Are there? Each error is counted with each manuscript we find. We have thousands of manuscripts. Two years ago at a conference I attended in El Paso, TX, Josh McDowell cited that there were up to 66,000 manuscripts or portions of manuscripts of the Bible, some of which date to within 50 years of the events written. In many cases, multiple copies have the same error. So we aren’t talking about hundreds of thousands of errors, but very few. No other ancient text can compare. The Iliad, Sophocles, Herodotus, Julius Caesar’s Gaelic Wars, and others all have single digit copies to hundreds, and the absolute best less than 2000 copies, many of which date multiple centuries after the originals were written. Those are accepted without question. So why are they skeptical about the Bible, when if they applied the same criteria to any other ancient history which they accept, that history would be unreliable? The answer is simple: they don’t WANT to believe the Bible, so they search for whatever excuse that allows them to sound smart in their unbelief. It works on impressionable freshmen, but to anyone who has done their homework, it is silliness at best.
The Bible did not go through the telephone game to get to us. Each translation goes back to copies of the original in the original language, pulling from the thousands of copies which enable us to get a clear picture of what the text says. It takes teams of numerous scholars, fluent in in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and likely Coptic, Syriac, and other languages from the area to put together a translation. They do so what they believe is best to get it as accurate as possible and as understandable as possible. And finally here, one does not need to be a language scholar to understand the Bible. The translators can be verified by other scholars on their work. To discuss which translation is best is worthy for another post. But do not believe the claims that the Bible got to us via the telephone game or something like that. There is nothing of the sort to support such claims. Next week, I will address another popular claim: The Overzealous Monk Theory.
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