Posted on 01/12/2019 1:22:02 PM PST by pcottraux
Can the Word of God Contain Errors?
By Philip Cottraux
When I read Lee Strobel’s The Case for the Real Jesus, one quote in particular stood out to me. This was during his interview with Daniel Wallace, a professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary:
STROBEL: “It was almost as if (Bart) Ehrman were saying ‘Find me one error and I’ll throw out the whole Bible.’ That’s something you hear at some ultraconservative Christian schools.”
WALLACE: “Good grief, that’s such a shockingly naïve approach to take! You’ve basically turned the Bible into the fourth person of the Trinity, as if it should be worshiped. I’ve actually had Christians tell me Jesus is called the Word, the Bible is called the Word, and so I worship the Bible. That’s scary.”
At first I didn’t understand this statement. After all, I made a similar argument for Bible inerrancy in a previous blog, The Bible IS Jesus. I’ve always understood that John 1 calls Jesus the Word, and therefore if the Bible is also the Word, it is Jesus. The idea that Christians could turn the Bible into an idol sounds contradictory.
The logic of inerrancy seems tight. If God is perfect and the Bible is His Word, wouldn’t it too be perfect? Operating under this assumption, skeptics and fundamentalist both assure us that if anything is slightly imperfect in the Bible, then the entire book collapses. Unfortunately, atheists have caused plenty of Christians to abandon their faith by pointing out errors and contradictions they claim it’s riddled with.
Bart Ehrman, head of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was originally an evangelical Christian who studied at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. However, while working on a degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, he came to a turning point when writing a paper on an apparent discrepancy in Mark 2. Realizing that it contained an irrefutable mistake, he questioned whether or not the Bible contained more mistakes, which would prove it to be man-made. Ehrman is now a controversial leading voice in the skeptic community and author of the best-selling book Misquoting Jesus.
Let me be clear before I continue; as a Christian, I do believe that the Bible is the infallible, authoritative Word of God. However, I think Ehrman serves as a cautionary tale of where too-strict inerrancy can lead you. This is a difficult subject, but I think tackling it will be very helpful for Christian readers. Because like it or not, atheists will confront us with this.
Let’s start with the hard evidence. At date, there are somewhere between 25-30,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament in languages ranging from Greek to Latin to Coptic, including 117 papyri from the first, second and third centuries. These include the Chester Beatty collection, the Oxyrynchus papyri, and the Bodmer collection (click here for a lecture I gave on this if you want to learn more). The earliest is p52, a piece of John 1 that dates anywhere from 90-110 AD. While most of them are fragments, scholars can piece them together enough to reconstruct with 99% certainty what the original New Testament said.
The New Testament was written originally in Koine (common) Greek, which was the secondary language of ancient Rome. Most citizens spoke two languages, their native tongue and Koine Greek to make communication across cultural boundaries easier. Since each New Testament book was written to a different church in different regions, they were all inscribed in this universal language to be accessible to as many as possible.
While Ehrman’s scholarly credentials are without question, his approach is deceitful, to say the least. He tends to manipulate his students and readers into anti-Christian conclusions with partial truths. One example is his rather sensationalist claim that there are between 200-400,000 “textual variants” in the New Testament, which proves it was tampered with by the early church and is so full of mistakes as to be untrustworthy.
Koine Greek is very different from modern English, as most ancient languages are. In an English sentence, the subject comes before the verb and predicate, and changing these would alter the meaning. For example, I pet the dog means something completely different from The dog pet I. But this is not the case in Koine Greek, making word order changes inevitable during translation.
These inconsequential differences account for 70-80% of Ehrman’s “textual variants.” When scrutinized, most of the rest are either spelling errors or equally meaningless mistranslations. For example, in Romans 5:1, does Paul say “We have peace” or “Let us have peace”? Or does 1 John 1:4 say “that our joy may be complete” or “that your joy may be complete”? Does it really matter?
But once we’ve discounted most variants, we’re still left with a handful of major differences between the modern New Testament and the original Greek fragments. For example, the story of the woman caught in adultery, which includes the infamous phrase “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” in John 7 doesn’t seem to appear in the earliest copies. Scholars are uncertain where this story first emerged and how it was incorporated in scripture, but the writing style of the passage is more consistent with Luke than John. Some have speculated that Luke may have found out about the story after publishing his gospel and attached it in later revisions as an appendage; a later early Christian scribe, unsure of where the story went, clumsily incorporated it into John.
When you factor in that there are literally tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts from the following centuries, every single “variance” is reproduced across the spectrum, artificially inflating the number of “variants” to seem higher than it actually is.
The real question Christians should ask is whether or not this affects doctrine. So far, not a single variance has changed any Christian theology. Contrary to common atheist claims, there is no evidence that the New Testament was altered by a sinister council of bishops. This nonsense falls into an anti-historical narrative that early Christianity was a religion of power-hungry madmen involved in shady conspiracies rather than a persecuted minority trying desperately to preserve their sacred writings.
What, then, of Ehrman’s original beef with Mark 2? The exact scripture is verse 26: How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? Jesus is teaching about the importance of the Sabbath and cites a story where David entered the tabernacle uninvited and ate the sacred showbread. According to Mark, Abiathar was the high priest. However, 1 Samuel 21:1-6 states that it was Ahimelech.
For me, this passage helps bring the historicity of the New Testament to life. While some apostles like Paul or Luke were well-educated, Peter was a fisherman most of his life and was probably not very literate. John Mark became his protégé at a young age, revealing the imperfection to be a small fingerprint of the real men who authored the New Testament.
This is why inerrancy is wrong. If a minor mistake is found in the Bible, the whole book does not fall apart. “What else could be wrong?” isn’t the next logical question. I’ve spent years investigating the archaeological evidence for the Bible stories. Most of them stand the test of real historical events. I’m firmly convinced that there was a real Exodus, a real conquest of Canaan and a real King David. Yet this is paltry when it comes to the evidence for Christ. Numerous historians of the time including Josephus, Thallus, and Tacitus reference him. We can reconstruct the basic outline of His biography from extra-biblical evidence that matches the gospels. Archaeological discoveries of coins and inscriptions verify historical details of Luke’s writings. The New Testament story is clearly based on true events. A mistake in Mark 2:26 doesn’t change that.
This is also true for the alleged contradictions within the gospels. Atheists often attack the scriptures on these grounds without realizing that contradictions are the hallmarks of accurate eyewitness accounts. Whenever two people see the same event, what they describe almost always differs, because they see through the filter of their own biases.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all differ in their accounts of the resurrection. This is a tell that they’re describing an actual event rather than a fabrication. We could be suspicious that foul play was involved concocting the narrative if all the details matched perfectly.
For the record, everything I’ve just said is also true of the Old Testament. The Dead Sea scrolls match the Masoretic texts (which most Bibles take their Old Testament from) about 80%. The twenty percent difference is mostly negligible discrepancies that do not affect Jewish theology.
But this still leaves us the original question of why a perfect God would allow imperfections in His Word. The answer requires us to clear up some fundamental presumptions of how He works and what the Bible being His Word actually means.
The first question is what exactly you mean by “the Bible.” People tend to narrowly define the term to just include modern English translations. But the Bible is so much more than that. It also includes the original ancient scrolls and manuscripts like the Septuagint and Greek codexes.
The Bible isn’t so much a physical book as an idea. It is therefore not limited by the imperfections of human language, which is beautifully revealing. It isn’t a perfect golden tablet that descended from the heavens. The Holy Spirit whispered what to write into the ears of prophets. Some of them had to work with poor vocabularies. But God never forcefully brought His Word into existence.
I would liken the Bible to a human being. As much as we would like to be defined by our physical traits, the mystery of human consciousness is more complicated than that; you can dissect a human brain, but you can never find a person’s mind. As you age, you get wiser. You wrinkle and your hair turns gray. But you’re still you. You have the same consciousness. The same soul. Jesus Himself was subject to the limits of a physical body. Despite being God made flesh, He wasn’t a glowing baby that never aged. He could be thirsty or hungry. He had to sleep. And He was suffered a horrible death on the cross.
The Bible has gone through translations and revisions. Each Hebrew or Greek word translated to modern English is a wrinkle it’s formed over the years. Or a hair turned gray. But it’s still the Bible. It has the same mind. Its revelations can never be corrupted no matter what form they take.
That message is the embodiment of Christ Himself. And unlike ink on pages, it will never die.
On one hand, you DO believe the Bible, or the scripture, “is extremely clear that Jesus is the Word of God.”
Just the “scriptures,” like John 1:1, 14, which are about Jesus the Word of God, and are indeed extremely clear, but not on other subjects in the Bible?
Sounds like you are extremely picky with the Bible. If the Bible is extremely clear on one subject, it can surely be so about other subjects.
Eye of the needle was a small gate in Jerusalem, a man would have to be low to go through, a camel could do it, but very difficult, it would have to essentially crawl.
Without the holy spirit, the bible is words on a page.
God is perfect. He cannot cease to be perfect. in fact the Jews had a word for Him that was “sadiq” which doesn’t just mean perfect but “bullseye, right down the middle, dead center, nothing but net” perfect.
God is sadiq. His Word is sadiq. However those who *translate* His Word can be imperfect. The amazing thing about the Bible is not how many errors there are in the many manuscripts unearthed in the early centuries but how *few* errors there are in those manuscripts. It was important to the people making the copies that there be no mistakes.
I believe we can have full confidence that the Holy Bible we have today is God’s inerrant Word and should anyone question the accuracy, consult the Hebrew and Greek texts that they came from.
The Hebrew word is ‘tisa’ (tav shin alef) which does indeed mean ‘take’ as in ‘take an oath’.
Jesus is the Word. The Bible contains God's words. Big difference.
In a word: NO.
Can the word of God contain errors?
In a word: NO.
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To more fully expand on that
Nope. It can not.
+1.
Those of us who read and love God’s Word KNOW it is from Him. Scripture is utterly amazing and life-giving and life-changing because it is communicated by His Spirit.
It is pure Fantaslyand to imagine knowing God without it. He has been having men, guided by the Spirit, WRITE DOWN His words for millennia. They did so and He preserved it. The unsearchable riches of Christ are shared there.
Scoffers need nothing but the flimsiest unbelief to denigrate them, while imagining they know the Author in a higher way. “I see God in my dog/kids/garden/beer/etc.!” Liars. All of that can be shaken, and will be. They need to move from unbelief to faith and discover what cannot be shaken, God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
Meanwhile, you can bet they’re hanging on every WORD coming from the father of lies through: TV, the movies, the books the websites, the music, the air whooshing through their heads.
Well and truly stated. O er the decades I have used a measuring rod with those who claim they were just born again: do they have a hunger for the Scriptures, for in them they hear their Father, by His Spirit.
This is a dangerous question - not in itself necessarily, but because it was under the auspices of this kind of question that Marxist/Frankfurt-style Higher Criticism took control of Theology.
That in turn gave rise to the search for the best (meaning apparently oldest) manuscripts, ignoring all else, in turn yielding the rejection of the Received Text in favor of the Westcott-Hort previously-rejected texts.
Not Jerusalem, damascus.
Still no proof that my comment about rope isn’t the truth
Left the Lord out of my comment
That should have some bearing on the answer to the question.
Did I mess up the cities? Dang.
My comment on the gate goes back a long ways. My friend’s dad was a pastor and talked about it.
Could that still mean then not to make a bad promise in God’s name. Which contextually could still be using God’s name to do evil. Otherwise, it could still mean we should never take and oath of office with ‘so help me God’. Then again.... consider the warning not to take a phony oath using God’s name to do evil, as is with politicians. I still contend it is more than just about swearing.
The Jewish practice is very broad and not limited to false oaths. I was just noting the exact translation.
A satanic question. SAME thing the serpent said to Eve to throw her off.
But people will ask, so it's the duty of Christians to be prepared with a solid answer. So this blog is my heavily researched response.
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