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What to Say When Someone Says "The Bible Has Errors"
Christian Post ^ | 03/07/2012 | Jonathan Dodson

Posted on 03/07/2012 6:43:36 AM PST by SeekAndFind

What to Say When Someone Says "The Bible Has Errors"

By Jonathan Dodson

Most people question the reliability of the Bible. You’ve probably been in a conversation with a friend or met someone in a coffeeshop who said: “How can you be a Christian when the Bible has so many errors?” How should we respond? What do you say?

Instead of asking them to name one, I suggest you name one or two of the errors. Does your Bible contain errors? Yes. The Bible that most people possess is a translation of the Greek and Hebrew copies of copies of the original documents of Scripture. As you can imagine, errors have crept in over the centuries of copying. Scribes fall asleep, misspell, take their eyes off the manuscript, and so on. I recommend telling people what kind of errors have crept into the Bible. Starting with the New Testament, Dan Wallace, New Testament scholar and founder the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, lists four types of errors in Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible’s Origin, Reliability, and Meaning.

Types of Errors

1) Spelling & Nonsense Errors. These are errors occur when a scribe wrote a word that makes no sense in its context, usually because they were tired or took their eyes off the page.Some of these errors are quite comical, such as "we were horses among you" (Gk. hippoi, "horses," instead of ēpioi, "gentle," or nēpioi, "little children") in 1 Thessalonians 2:7 in one late manuscript. Obviously, Paul isn’t saying he acted like a horse among them. That would be self-injury! These kinds of errors are easily corrected.

2) Minor Changes. These minor changes are as small as the presence or absence of an article "the" or changed word order, which can vary considerably in Greek. Depending on the sentence, Greek grammar allows the sentence to be written up to 18 times, while still saying the same thing! So just because a sentence wasn’t copied in the same order, doesn’t mean that we lost the meaning.

3) Meaningful but not Plausible. These errors have meaning but aren't a plausible reflection of the original text. For example, 1 Thessalonians 2:9, instead of "the gospel of God" (the reading of almost all the manuscripts), a late medieval copy has "the gospel of Christ." There is a meaning difference between God and Christ, but the overall manuscript evidence points clearly in one direction, making the error plain and not plausibly part of the original.

4) Meaningful and Plausible. These are errors that have meaning and that the alternate reading is plausible as a reflection of the original wording. These types of errors account for less than 1% of all variants and typically involve a single word or phrase. The biggest of these types of errors is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which most contemporary scholars to not regard as original. Our translations even footnote that!

Is the Bible Reliable?

So, is the Bible reliable? Well, the reliability of our English translations depends largely upon the quality of the manuscripts they were translated from. The quality depends, in part, on how recent the manuscripts are. Scholars like Bart Ehrman have asserted that we don't have manuscripts that are early enough. However, the manuscript evidence is quite impressive:

What to Say When Someone Says “The Bible Has Errors”.

So, when someone asserts that the Bible says errors, we can reply by saying: “Yes, our Bible translations do have errors, let me tell you about them. But as you can see, less than 1% of them are meaningful and those errors don’t affect the major teachings of the Christian faith. In fact, there are 1000 times more manuscripts of the Bible than the most documented Greco-Roman historian by Suetonius. So, if we’re going to be skeptical about ancient books, we should be 1000 times more skeptical of the Greco-Roman histories. The Bible is, in fact, incredibly reliable.”

Contrary to popular assertion, that as time rolls on we get further and further away from the original with each new discovery, we actually get closer and closer to the original text. As Wallace puts it, we have "an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the biblical documents." Therefore, we can be confident that what we read in our modern translations of the the ancient texts is approximately 99% accurate. It is very reliable.

For Further Study (order easy to difficult):



TOPICS: Apologetics; Religion & Culture; Theology
KEYWORDS: bible; historicity; inerrancy
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1 posted on 03/07/2012 6:43:50 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

The translations of the Bible are guided by God’s hand. They are meant to instruct us on matters of life and morals. It is how God tells us of our relationship to Him and, for Christians, His Son.

It is when people try to use it for other purposes, such as a science text, that translation errors (what was meant by “yom” anyway?) become important. The point of Genesis is that God created the world and us. It isn’t a “how to” guide.


2 posted on 03/07/2012 6:55:43 AM PST by freedumb2003 (Spoiler Alert! The secret to Terra Nova: THEY ARE ALL DEAD!!!)
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To: SeekAndFind

See www.faithfacts.org for more apologetics facts.


3 posted on 03/07/2012 7:02:19 AM PST by grumpa
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To: SeekAndFind
The biggest of these types of errors is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which most contemporary scholars to not regard as original. Our translations even footnote that!

That opinion is not universal, the great mass of Byzantine manuscripts include it. I think a very strong case can be made that the last 12 verses of Mark are the inspired Word of God. I'm afraid exclusion rests on isolated manuscripts and subjective academic imagination producing an artificial "eclectic text".

4 posted on 03/07/2012 7:04:30 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
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To: freedumb2003

Does God guide the translations of all of the new versions of the Bible? Even he ones that are politically correct?


5 posted on 03/07/2012 7:05:11 AM PST by Kirkwood (Zombie Hunter)
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To: SeekAndFind
..since the beginning God's Word has been under attack

But in modern times with Harold Lindsell's "Battle for the Bible" a warning went out to the church in general that this was happening in every seminary of every denomination and would destroy much of the foundation of visible church

I believe Francis Schaeffer called this the watershed issue in "The Great Evangelical Disaster"...

6 posted on 03/07/2012 7:08:04 AM PST by WalterSkinner ( In Memory of My Father--WWII Vet and Patriot 1926-2007)
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To: SeekAndFind

I call em a doodie head and move on.


7 posted on 03/07/2012 7:12:30 AM PST by cripplecreek (What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?)
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To: SeekAndFind
These are errors occur when a scribe wrote a word that makes no sense in its context, usually because they were tired or took their eyes off the page.Some of these errors are quite comical, such as "we were horses among you"

Why the assumption it was because they were 'tired or took their eyes off the page'? That seems like quite an assumption. It could easily been simple context we don't understand. Just like in your example, we call children 'kids' but in some cultures, that means baby goats.

Imagine two thousand years from now, someone reads that "SeekandFind took his Jaguar to watch the Rams battle the Lions. They later ate Buffalo Wings and drank Fuzzy Nipples". Without context, the picture that paints is quite different from reality.

8 posted on 03/07/2012 7:12:35 AM PST by mnehring
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To: SeekAndFind
Unfortunately this doesn't help much. The part of the Bible that most people have problems with, myself included, isn't the New Testament, but the Old Testament. Specifically Genesis, which is the oldest book of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament was an oral tradition for a very long time, even by its own chronology. It was not written down until Moses did so at end of Exodus. There is no good way to track down changes made to an oral tradition as, by their very nature, earlier versions leave no evidence.

In addition there are edits. Words that only came into use during the Babylonian exile appear in text of the earlier books. I don't have the examples at hand but in my Theology class 20 some years ago a number of them were pointed out. The one I remember most clearly is when Moses comes down from getting the ten commandments and finds the Israelites in sin. One group is continuously exonerated of being part of the rabble, but the words used would not be ones used by someone before the exile. Clearly some scribe, a member of the latter group, decided to exonerate his ancestors when he made a later copy of the Torah.

The final difference between early Greek and Roman histories and the Bible is the ability to criticize parts without criticizing the whole. I can use the history of Rome to say that Rome had kings, then there was a rebellion and it became a republic. I can do this despite saying that Romulus and Remus weren't raised by wolves because wolves eat babies not raise them. The early oral tradition creation story can be separated from the historically consistent, and relevant later sections.

The Bible in contrast is often presented as all or nothing. Either you take every word, including 7 day creation, 6000 year old Earth and mega flood or nothing. Most of the Bible holds up extremely well historically. Even Exodus hold up as Egyptian hieroglyphics show Ramses attacking the Israelites (he claims to have driven them out, turns out they had Baghdad Bob back then too). What is important is that the hieroglyphic shows the Israelites as a nomadic people. His grandson also mentions the Israelites, but in that case the hieroglyphic shows them as a settled people. Close enough to 40 years of wandering for me.

But Genesis just has to be taken purely on faith. Unlike the gospels of the New Testament this is faith in opposition to otherwise provable facts.
9 posted on 03/07/2012 7:14:37 AM PST by GonzoGOP (There are millions of paranoid people in the world and they are all out to get me.)
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To: freedumb2003

re: “The translations of the Bible are guided by God’s hand.”

I’m not sure what you mean by this statement regarding translations - could you elaborate further? Remember, it is the original autographs (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.) that are inerrant - not “translations”.

I’m not denying that God is involved in preserving His word through the centuries, but I think we are opening ourselves up to error and embarrassment to promote the idea that specific “translations” are “guided by God’s hand.”

Also, I think you sell the Bible short when you say it is not a science text. It depends on the passage you’re speaking of. The Bible is not one kind of writing - it includes biography, historical narrative, poetry, allegory, preaching, prophesy, and, sometimes scientific statements. The problem is, you have to know the Biblical text well enough, the context of the passage, and it’s history in order to know what type of literature you’re reading.

Some people want to group the whole Bible into being all “allegorical” or all history, or all science. You can’t do that with the Bible. Just a thought.


10 posted on 03/07/2012 7:17:49 AM PST by rusty schucklefurd
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To: SeekAndFind
This Bible has NO ERRORS.
11 posted on 03/07/2012 7:20:32 AM PST by Lazamataz (Today. I shall report evey single thing I see to the admin.)
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To: freedumb2003

Yeah, I guess God also guided the hand of Constantine and his bishops as well as King James and his bishops. These “versions” of the bible were “inspired” by political motives far more than religious motives.

It has always amazed me how so many people become entrenched in the concept of infallibility of the bible, in particular the old testament, but deride the concept catholics have of the infallibility of the pope.

It might be better service to God if the lessons of the bible, especially the new testament, were given more attention than the carefully edited collection of old testament books which were collected and edited by emperors and kings.


12 posted on 03/07/2012 7:20:57 AM PST by RJS1950 (The democrats are the "enemies foreign and domestic" cited in the federal oath)
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To: SeekAndFind

ping


13 posted on 03/07/2012 7:29:58 AM PST by Rich21IE
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To: SeekAndFind

Keeper, thanks!


14 posted on 03/07/2012 7:31:21 AM PST by vanilla swirl (We are the Patrick Henry we have been waiting for!)
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To: SeekAndFind

later.


15 posted on 03/07/2012 7:32:28 AM PST by mikeus_maximus (GOP "moderates" like Bush opened the door for Obama and showed him the path he's now running down.)
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To: RJS1950
Yeah, I guess God also guided the hand of Constantine and his bishops as well as King James and his bishops. These “versions” of the bible were “inspired” by political motives far more than religious motives.

Let me say, in all sincerity and kindeness, you're clueles about the subject of how these translations came about, and those since then. Willfully ignorant, in fact.

16 posted on 03/07/2012 7:34:59 AM PST by mikeus_maximus (GOP "moderates" like Bush opened the door for Obama and showed him the path he's now running down.)
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To: GonzoGOP
The Old Testament was an oral tradition for a very long time, even by its own chronology. It was not written down until Moses did so at end of Exodus

No, this would not have been only oral tradition. There were written records at that time Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Remember Stephen said Moses was one of the most learned men of his day (raised and educated in Pharaoh's household) so he would have had access to many written records.

Yes, oral tradition before Moses' time would certainly have been part of the way history was transmitted. However, that was the way they communicated back then; because of our culture we don't trust it. However, that was ingrained in ancient times and was as trustworthy (or more so) than our written tradition is today. Think of Homer...he and others were trained to recite Illiad-length words and if they got some words wrong they would hear about it. And Homer was late in the tradition...earlier ones had even better memories.

but the words used would not be ones used by someone before the exile

I would like to know exactly what you're referencing here.

17 posted on 03/07/2012 7:36:02 AM PST by what's up
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To: SeekAndFind

Goes to the basic problem with sola scriptura: too many personal interpretations and errors introduced by biases and the like.

Christ founded his Church and promised that the Holy Spirit would guide it in all Truth.

That promise was True.


18 posted on 03/07/2012 7:37:36 AM PST by moonhawk (Rush, Mark, Sean: Conservative talkers. Sarah, Newt: Conservative DOers. Mitt: Conservative faker)
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To: moonhawk

RE: Christ founded his Church and promised that the Holy Spirit would guide it in all Truth.

Therefore your conclusion is the Holy Spirit ONLY guides the Vatican infallibly?


19 posted on 03/07/2012 7:39:34 AM PST by SeekAndFind (question)
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To: RJS1950
Yeah, I guess God also guided the hand of Constantine and his bishops as well as King James and his bishops

The ancient patristic writings provides evidence of a universally accepted canon long before Constantine or any council of bishops.

20 posted on 03/07/2012 7:40:20 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
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