When is the truth not the truth? When it is half of the truth. When one gives a factual statement out of context. When the “truth” in isolation implies the opposite of what would be understood when the complete context is known, it is no longer the truth. When telling the partial truth knowing the full truth, it is a lie. This is what is being done by skeptics and attackers of the Bible. Statements they make are true and fully acknowledged by Christian scholars, but they all know the full story but conveniently keep those details out to support an invalid charge against the reliability of the biblical text.
Maybe an example of a half-truth would help. Suppose I tell you I saw a man beating another man repeatedly. People were just watching and cheering the guy on. You would think I was talking about one of the many acts of violence which have been reported of late. Well, I left a part out. I was at a boxing match! Kind of changes the scene, doesn’t it? What I said was true but only part of the truth. I know I was leading you to a false conclusion thus I was telling you a lie. A lie with true but intentionally incomplete facts, is still a lie.
This is what is happening with atheists, skeptics, and other attackers of Christianity and the Bible. We are going to look at three truths which are actually lies. The first is about the age of the copies we have of the NT. The next is about how the biblical texts were copied and the final one is about the number of errors or variants there are between the texts.
Before getting into this, I want to speak to the dichotomy of the work of textual criticism. What scholars do to determine the correct reading of any passage of the Bible is hard, painstaking work. It is incredibly complicated. There are no set rules but only guidelines which lead them to make very careful conclusions. Rarely is there 100% certainty when dealing with variants of ancient texts. Even when you and I would have no doubt, they are so careful and desire such precision the ethics of their profession will not allow then to claim 100% certainty. Praise God for these people who do this demanding work with such great integrity.
On the other side, while the work is difficult, the concepts around the issues of variants, thankfully, are not difficult to understand. Do an experiment. Take a book of the NT say John and copy it. Give it the best you can. Then see what errors you made in the process. It is way more difficult to copy a text then you might think. The mistakes you make are the same errors a scribe or copyist would make: misspellings, dropping a word or two, or accidentally writing a word twice. You might even skip a whole line as your eye moves back and forth from your writing and the text and inadvertently land on the wrong spot especially when there is the same word at different spots in the text. These mistakes are the variants we find in the biblical manuscripts (handwritten copies).
We will not look at all the issues in this post, it is much too involved for this post. It would take a whole book. So let me recommend one: The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? by James R. White (see our Suggested Reading ) for more helpful sources). While this is a book countering the position the King James Version is the only valid, authoritative Bible, it also does a wonderful job explaining the diverse variant issues and gives numerous examples of each. I’m not interested in the KJV only stuff, but I love this book for its handling of the textual issues. Well worth the read!
So, let’s look at the first “truth”. Skeptics of the validity of the NT text will point out we do not have a single original writing (often call the “Autographs”) of any book of the Bible. We don’t even have copies of the originals. We don’t have copies of the copies. What we have, for the most part, are copies made centuries after the originals were written after many generations of copying.
How do we respond to this? Well simply: “Yes, that’s correct”. It is the truth we do not have the original texts which were most likely written on papyrus. Papyrus is a thick, paper-like material produced from the soft center of the Cyperus papyrus plant which was used in ancient time as paper. Papyrus would only last for about 100 years. Only in extraordinary circumstances do these documents make it down to us 2,000 years later and must be given great care to help continue to preserve them. The NT material would have been well worn as they were passed along to be read and copied. They are all dust now along with most of the copies of the texts.
We also readily agree the vast majority of the manuscripts we do have come from eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. BUT—this is where the lack of full truth comes in—we do have copies from before this time. We even have copies from the second century. A few from less than a hundred years from the originals! Papyrus P57, a copy of a very small portion of the Gospel of John, has been dated by four independent labs as being written from 95 to 130 AD. This is possibly less than 50 years from the original! Which is also significate as the standard position in European scholars before the discovery of this text was the Gospel of John was not written until the late second century possibly as late as 180 AD. Well, this find changed that! Can’t have a copy before the original is written.
The full truth is we do not have any originals or early copies of any ancient document; not the works of Plato, Julius Creaser, Tatius or any others. We do not have the originals text of the Homer and the Iliad. This is normal and expected. No scholar questions our knowledge of what Plato taught in the early fourth century BC, but they will question the NT based on an unreasonable standard of 100% certainty they do not apply to any other documents, ancient or modern, but only to the Bible!
The lie is this lack of originals or many early copies is an issue. It is not, for there is not a lack of copies (we will see this more fully below in the third lie). The NT is the best attested document of all time! The skeptic knows this, but the full truth is not their concern. Their goal is to undermine our faith in the Bible, to have us question the Bible as a reliable source. Simply stating the full truth squishes their attack!
The next half truth is when the skeptic claims the copying of the biblical text was like the Telephone Game. If you haven’t played this, let me explain. In the telephone game, the first person in a circle of people (it works best with groups of 10 or more) gets a note with a phrase written on it. That person then whispers the phrase to the next person who does the same to the next until we get to the last person. The last person then states the phrase out load, well a phrase, as he heard it. Almost always there is very little resemblance between the phrase which was written down to start the game and the end result.
This game is compared to the copying of the biblical text. The claim is by the time we get down hundreds of years with countless generations of copies we no longer know what the original said. For unlike the game, we do not have the original to compare it to.
Yes, this is how the Telephone game is played but the telephone game is NOTHING like the copying of the Biblical text. Just think for a moment. You are living in the first century and you are given a copy of the letter to the Romans to copy for your church, others or even for your own personal use. Remember almost immediately what was written by the Apostles was considered Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16). Thus, you know you are not playing a game. You of course would take this as the most sacred and serious task you have ever had. You would be so careful in getting everything as correct as you could. You may make a mistake, but you would give it all you have.
This is NOT how the Telephone Game is played. Remember the game is mostly played by pre- and early teenagers. The fun is in seeing how silly the end result could be. They are not passing along the Word of God. Between the whispers of the line to each person is a lot of giggling. I played as a kid in my youth group. It was a fun game, especially if we really got the line messed up.
Is this how you would be copying the Word of God? NO! You would not be doing this while giggling and thinking about the girls in the room (or boys in the case of the girls). Your attention would be fixed on the task. Even as an amateur scribe, you would do your best. If you were a professional scribe, you would be even more serious. This is your career. Get a reputation as a poor copyist and you are out of work!
Another major difference is you and the scribes would have continual access to the text, if an egregious error is detected it could be destroyed and attempted again. As opposed to the game where the participants have one maybe two chances to verbally convey the correct message to the next person before it is passed on and on. There would also still be access to the older copies for a time, to compare any issues in the new copies. So not only is the motive for passing the message dissimilar, the mechanism for passing the message is so dissimilar it makes the comparison absolutely ridiculous.
Yes, there is the truth the players of the Telephone Game and those who copied the NT are each passing information along to other, but that is the end of the connection. One is having fun, the other is driven by the divinely called task. Again, the “truth” out of context is a lie.
The final “truth” we will look at is the claims of over 400,000 errors in the text of the Bible and this proves the NT is unreliable; we have no idea what the original text said. There are about 138,000 words in the Greek NT so, the 400,000 errors in the text are more than there are words in the NT.
As an aside before I give the response, I will keep saying 400,000 for I want you to be ok with that number. Those who are attacking our faith want the number to shock us. Some may even use 500,000. Half A Millon Errors! 400,000 is more likely, even less depending on how one counts the variants. The texts of all the copies of the Greek NT take up about one and a half million pages. We don’t know the number of words in all the Greek manuscripts we have. Many of the texts are just now being scanned so all scholars can see and work with them without having to use poor facsimiles, or microfiche (If you remember microfiche; you’re showing your age) or travel to the various sites where they are housed. The next major advance will be getting all the texts into a digital format allowing for better computer analysis of them. This is very expensive work with no monetary gain, so money is not pouring into these projects.
Our response, again we say, “Yes, we know that, but it is not the whole story.” To start, the 400,000 variants do not come from just one copy of the NT, thus it is not 400,000 variants out of 138,000 words. It might interest you in knowing the second most attested ancient document is Homer (Iliad) from c. 900 BC which has over 600 manuscripts in existence. Tacitus’ work from about 100 AD has only 20 extant copies. The number one attested document from antiquity with the most manuscript copies in existence is the NT. Are you ready for this? . . . with over 5,800 copies of all or portions of the NT in Greek. No other ancient work has anything near this number. The Bible has over 5,800 manuscripts: the ancient document with next most manuscripts has less than 700! More biblical texts are still being found. In the last 150 years, 130 more manuscripts have been found including P57 mentioned above. You should know none of these 130 manuscripts changed the reading of a single passage of the NT but did help to confirm the reading we already know!
This is still only part of the story for there are over 15,000 manuscripts of the Greek NT in other languages such as Aramaic, Arabic, Latin, Coptic (an Egyptian dialect), Syriac and others. If this is not enough, the early church pastors and leaders—known collectively as the Church Fathers—quoted from the NT over a million times in letters, sermons, position papers and commentaries. We could recreate the NT from their writings with only 11 verses out of the 7,957 verse in the NT missing. When the textual critics need help to determine the correct wording of any passage in the NT, there is no shortage of help.
The truth is 400,000 variants is a good thing. Remember we do not have the original. If we only had a handful of copies, we would be less likely to know with true rendering with any level of certainty. With over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, the manuscripts in other languages and the works of the Church Fathers, there is no question on over 90% of the wording in the Greek NT. Of the 400,000 variants, 99% are completely insignificant such as spelling errors. So, there are only about 4,000 variants which do raise a question. Even half of those are of limited significance but only about 50 are of any real issue to interpreting a passage. In our next post about variants, we will look at the nature and types of variants themselves.
What is the most important number to take away from this discussion? ZERO! That is zilch, none, nada! There are NO variant readings effecting our beliefs. Nothing depends on which variant we accept. No variant alters our theology or Christian doctrines. NONE! Another known fact left out by the anti-Christian “scholars”.
Do you notice a common pattern to our response to these attacks? First, we acknowledge that which is truth. We don’t hide it; we readily admit it, but we don’t stop there. We look for the rest of the story. We look at all the facts not just the ones cherry-picked by the attacker. We look for where the skeptic is over stating his case. What we don’t do is just accept the charge at face value. We don’t jump to doubt. We test their claims, for we know their end game: to get us to reject God and His Word. Regardless of the lies we are told (lies masquerading as truths—half-truths), we can rest assured our gracious and loving Father made sure we have His reliable Word. We can read, study, and obey it with all the confidence in the God who gave and passed it down to us!
Until the next time we see you here at CultivatingFaith.org, God Bless! #CultivatingFaithOrg
Photo by Drobot Dean