Revival Living #9: Our Source

Rightly do we call the Bible, "The Word of God." However, it would be foolish to assume that such a title implies we find in the Bible a compendium of all God has to say. Nor should we take it to mean there is nothing else to know about the things mentioned on its pages. Rather, the phrase, "The Word of God" means that, between the front and back covers, we find what God intended to have written.

Having said as much, it is important to note that in some places, we are not exactly sure what was originally written. We have no original documents (called autographs) to work from; we have copies of copies. Indeed, we have numerous ancient copies of each book of the Bible, written in several translations. Many complete Bible texts have been found in various places around the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Of all the ancient documents scholars have attempted to reconstruct from later copies, the Bible is the easiest. This is due to the overwhelming number of good quality copies available. We are more certain of the original text of the Bible from 2000 years ago than we are of Shakespeare's works from just 400 years ago. Using the tools of documentary analysis, we have been able to reconstruct, with reasonable certainty, all but a few paragraphs of all 66 books.

Therein lies a major issue: reasonable certainty. Not absolute certainty, but sufficient to be sure that the variations between one text and another are insignificant. For example, there is a particular difficulty regarding numerals. Biblical languages used letters and words as numbers, and often used words that had other meanings. For example, in the Hebrew language, the word commonly used to represent the number "1000" (`eleph) was written the same as the word used to describe "a professionally trained, full-time soldier." In some cases, the difficulty with numbers in the Bible is a simple matter of copyist error. With careful analysis, we can usually reconstruct the original values that had become corrupted over time. In terms of its significance for the individual believer, we have all the certainty we need to act upon everything we are able to understand from the Bible. Also note that, in the Hebrew mind, numbers were often more symbolic than literal.

There is no hidden agenda here in this series. Only when we deny that we are operating under any assumptions are we being deceptive. Listed below are those assumptions of which I am aware.

1. Long before there was an organized attempt to establish which books belonged in the Bible -- to "establish a canon" -- common practice in the churches had settled the issue. The Church Councils around the end of the fourth century AD (specifically the Third Council of Carthage 397 and the Council of Hippo 419) were simply acknowledging officially what the People of God, by the Holy Spirit's guidance, already knew. Decisions by Councils after that period added other books, but such councils were deeply compromised by secular political concerns. The 66 titles now found in most Protestant versions of the Bible are used here.
2. The authority and accuracy of the Bible are not in question. We may debate what it says, but not the veracity of what it says. I may contradict your favorite viewpoint on a particular passage. Don't assume I am thereby contradicting the Word itself. Let's simply agree that we disagree in our analysis.
3. There is no one perfectly accurate and authoritative English translation of the Bible. The simple act of translation itself will of necessity change the meaning of things from the original. It is not possible to fully translate from one language to another without a total equivalence in cultures. Something will always be lost. Indeed, even within the same language, from one period of history to another, there will be differences in the meanings of words. Within Jewish culture, these differences were great enough in themselves to make Genesis -- written substantially by Moses -- challenging reading for Israeli citizens in King David's time, some 500 years later. The blend of cultures in New Testament Jerusalem would be all the more foreign to Abraham and Moses, and only slightly less foreign to Jesus, who came from Galilee. The great leap from those cultures to ours guarantees that any English translation will only approximate the meaning at best.
4. There are no original manuscripts available in the original languages. We are unable to physically compare what we have now with what was first written. There are however, a collection of manuscripts, commonly referred to as the "Majority Text." They reflect the careful preservation of New Testament writings by the Greek-speaking churches in the Byzantine Empire. These manuscripts are strongly verified by quotations of Scripture contained in the works by the early Church Fathers (Bible scholars of first few centuries after Christ). The earliest of these scholars seemed to have had access to autographs, or first-generation copies. This body of texts is behind the King James and New King James versions. Most modern English translations are based on the corrupt texts produced by Westcott and Hort, self-proclaimed experts in the 1800s who held doctrinal views hostile to the common Christian orthodoxy. It is my contention that men hostile to the Truth cannot be trusted to honestly appraise the text of Scripture, whatever their scholarly pedigree. The story of their work, and how it was adopted as the standard, has been one of the best-kept secrets of modern Christianity. Whole books have been written on this debate, and there is little to gain by summarizing it here.
5. To the Hebrew people, a historical record was the property of the community, not of the individual author. It was a common practice for scribes, when making a fresh copy, to change obsolete place-names so that the readers of his time would recognize the reference. These are noted in the following series on Bible History when it matters, to avoid confusion.

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Ed Hurst
15 June 2003, revised 06 November 2003

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