Is a little knowledge always a dangerous thing?
Probably not. But if I actually think the texts of the Bible are fluid documents—that is, rehashed, redrafted versions of the original languages, then I’m only fooling myself.
The history I present here is meant to encourage Jesus Christ’s disciple to seek a fuller understanding of God’s written word by acquiring the skills to help him do just that. But truth isn’t a gift that just falls out of the sky. Learning to pursue it is a skill that has to be developed like anything else.
If it’s not, even the most faithful disciple can be easily deceived.
One of the most flagrant lies about the reliability of Bible texts is one that seems innocent enough to be believable. While often cited from a pagan perspective, the idea that what was originally recorded in the Scriptures has somehow been “lost in the translations” over the millennia is also endorsed in some circles of the Christian community—including at least one [formerly] well-respected textual critic!
This logic appeals to an element of common sense in all of us. The first guy copies the original, and the second guy copies that copy…and so on and so forth over a period of four thousand years. So, if I inject human error into the equation, it’s natural to assume that much of what was first written has morphed into something quite different today.
But there’s one big problem with this theory.
Even though no original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament letters and narratives [for example] are known to exist, our translations today are carefully refined periodically and rendered out of a multitude of existing ancient manuscripts—-some which are very old, having been discovered in the past two-hundred years and are estimated to have been written as early as the second or third century, A.D.
There’s also another snag.
When someone argues that the Bible cannot be without error because there are several hundred thousand textual variants [or differences] among all the existing manuscripts, he’ll often forget to mention [or be wholly unaware] that nearly all of these discrepancies are typos, misspelled words and accent variations.
But as one who regularly translates the Nestle-Aland 28th Edition of the Greek New Testament and notes most differences listed in the textual apparatus, I can assure you that virtually none of these variants affect the intended meanings of the authors. What few inconsistencies exist are often the result of translational bias [1] instead.
The same could be said about the many translations in use today. Some are more literal than others, but, for the most part, they all say the same thing.
The bottom line is that, with scholars and textual critics having over 5000 of these ancient manuscripts [and many more corroborating fragments of them] at their disposal, the Scriptures are obviously the most documented collation of literature in history!
While all these documents may not match in form, they validate one another in bringing across the meaning and purpose of God’s written word.
He has made it happen!