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We know this for two reasons. First, God has
promised very specifically that He would do it.
Second, the historical evidence shows God's
continuing faithfulness to His promise.
What's At Issue?
If the authentic, untainted Word
of God is to be translated from the original
Hebrew and Greek into our own language, we need
to have an authentic original. How can we know
that we have an authentic original today,
thousands of years after the Bible was written?
The Bible itself gives us the
answer. The same God who calls upon His people
to obey the Bible alone in every area of life
and ministry has also made a vital promise
concerning His Word:
He will preserve it and keep it
pure in all ages.
We have this promise from Christ
Himself, who declared that until heaven and
earth shall pass away, not a single letter nor
even the smallest stroke of a single letter of
the Scriptures shall be taken away (Matthew
5:18). Jesus also said that “the Scripture
cannot be broken” (John 10:35). We have God’s
promise that “the Word of the Lord endures
forever” (Isaiah 40:8).
Providential
Preservation: A Vital Doctrine
Today many Evangelicals do not
grasp the vital importance of God’s promise to
preserve His Word uncorrupted in all ages. One
result is the use, in many translations, of
highly questionable source texts that do not
bear the marks of His providential preservation.
The church does this at its peril. If we are not
careful to use authentic source texts for the
translation of the Scriptures into our own
language, the inevitable result will be a Bible
version that is less than fully the Word of God.
Which source texts are the
authentic ones? Hundreds of books and essays
have been written on this question. The correct
answer involves careful evaluation of thousands
of pieces of evidence using the sciences of
linguistics and textual analysis. Without
getting bogged down in those daunting details,
what follows is a very brief summary of the
answer.
Although we do not have the
original manuscripts, it is clear that God has
providentially preserved His Word in the
original languages. There is more manuscript
evidence for the authenticity of the Old and New
Testaments than for any other book, ancient or
modern. For example, there are over 5,000
manuscripts of the books of the Greek New
Testament, some of them from as early as 50
years after the time of the apostles. By
comparison, there are only seven available
manuscripts of the writings of Plato, and the
earliest is from 1,200 years after his death.
Yet postmodern scholars rarely question the
authenticity of the writings of Plato, while
constantly questioning the authenticity of the
New Testament!
The Preserved Hebrew Text
The Hebrew text.
Beginning with Moses, God made provisions for
the preservation of the Hebrew text of the Torah
(the first five books of the
Bible). Every Israelite was commanded to know
the Torah and to teach it to his children (e.g.,
Deuteronomy 4:9, 6:6-9, 11:19). An original copy
of the Torah
was kept in the Ark of the
Covenant (Deuteronomy 31:19-29) which was first
in the tabernacle and later in the temple. In
due course, Hebrew scholars tell us, manuscripts
of the books of the rest of the Old Testament
were added until they became a complete
authoritative manuscript of the Old Testament.
At the time of the destruction of the Second
Temple in 70 A.D., Jewish scholars met at
Jamnia, northeast of Gaza, and began what became
the work of the Masoretes, Jewish
scribes who preserved the
authentic text until the 11th century. Other
scribes took over the work until the 15th
century. In the 16th century, Jacob ben
Chayim produced an authenticated version of the
Masoretic text which has come to be known as the
Hebrew portion of the Received Text. This is the
source text for the Geneva Bible
used by the Pilgrims (1560), the
King James Bibles of both 1611 and 1769 (the
Authorized Version used today), and the New King
James Bible (1982).
A Hebrew text of the Old
Testament called the Bahya ben Asher text,
produced by a competing group of scribes, is
considered by the most careful scholars to be
much less authentic; there are over 20,000
differences from the ben Chayim text. Yet the
ben Asher text is the one used for the Old
Testament in most Bible versions today. Later in
this series, we’ll explain why.
The Preserved Greek Text
The Greek text.
As noted earlier, over 5,000
Greek manuscripts of the New Testament exist
today, some from the early decades after the
apostles. Most of these support what is called
the Byzantine body of manuscripts. Beginning in
the 1500s, scholars such as Erasmus, Stephens,
and Beza used these manuscripts to compile the
Greek New Testament portion of what is now
called the Received Text of the Bible. The
Protestant Reformers and their successors used
the Received Text to produce the English Bibles
named above, among others. In the 1800s, English
scholar John Burgon did extensive research
proving that the Greek text used by the
post-apostolic church fathers was the same as
what is now known as the Received Text.
What About the Critical Text?
However, in the late 1800s
another form of the Greek New Testament, called
by various names (e.g., Alexandrian, Westcott-Hort,
Nestle-Aland, or Critical Text), became the one
used for most New Testament translations. This
text omits many words, verses, and passages
found in the Received Text and in the
translations that are based on it. The Critical
Text is based on a small handful of Greek
manuscripts dating from the 4th century onward.
The Critical Text varies greatly
from Greek New Testament quotations found in the
writings of post-apostolic church fathers. The
Critical Text differs from the Received Text
over 5,300 times, omitting over 2,800 words from
the Gospels alone. Many of these omissions
affect essential doctrines such as the deity and
virgin birth of Christ.
The preceding material first appeared in the
October, 2008 issue of our monthly print
publication,
The Profitable Word,
in an article titled "Scripture and You:
Finding the Right Bible" (part two).
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