Your word, O LORD,
is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens.
Psalm
119:89
If a man
digs a pit, he will fall into it; if a man rolls a stone, it will roll back on
him.
Proverbs
26:27
According to Prof. Bart Ehrman (University
of NC at Chapel Hill) there are more textual variations in the manuscripts of
the New Testament than there are words.[1] If you accept what he says
without thinking and investigating, you'll likely join him in thinking that the
Bible is unreliable, that Psalm 119:89 is a lie.
One of the reasons that there are so
many textual variations is that there are so many manuscripts. There are 274
Uncial[2] manuscripts, 2555
Miniscule[3] manuscripts and 2280
Lectionary manuscripts. There are 10 thousand non-Latin translations and 8000 Latin translations (Vulgate). In
addition, there are more than a million quotes in the writings of the Church
patriarchs. Some of these date back to the second century. In comparison, there
are 643 manuscripts of Homer's the Iliad, the earliest of which was copied 500
years after the original.
The
professor concludes that because there are so many variations (one writer
claimed half a million) it is impossible to know what the New Testament
originally said. The first problem with this claim is that it doesn't account
for the types of variations involved. Many of them are as simple as spelling
changes, transpositions of letters or words, omission of a word because the
words around it either begin or end similarly or other unintentional copy
errors that do not change the meaning of the text. The second problem with this
claim is that because we have so many manuscripts, we can compare them and
build "family trees" with them, this allows us to watch the changes
take place. We can follow them back as geneticists the human genome and
determine that some of us of European stock have Neanderthal heritage.
Very few of the variations are
described as substantive and meaningful. They do not change the meaning of the
text in a way that changes any major doctrine. When you read a study Bible, you
may find notes on some passages saying something like "This passage is not
included in some early manuscripts."
At this point, we have no reason to
say that it's impossible to know what the original manuscripts said. We have
strong reason to believe that we know what the vast majority of the text said,
and where there is question, we can know there is question. The reason we have
that strong reason is precisely because of his claimed reason we should doubt
it.
To those who wish we had the
originals, Daniel B. Wallace (a leading expert on ancient Greek) suggests that
it is a good thing we don't, because it's likely they would be treated as
relics: venerated but not examined.
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Birthday of Adolf Hitler
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