Posted on 03/07/2012 6:43:36 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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):
GonzoGOP wrote:
“The oldest known Hebrew text was found in November of 2008. it is a 3,000-year-old pottery shard with five lines of text was found during excavations of the Elah Fortress, the oldest known biblical-period fortress, which dates to the tenth century BC. It was written in Proto-Canaanite script.”
This statement is a bit misleading. Now, note that I am not saying that you are trying to mislead, simply that the statement is misleading. Hebrew as a language is a member of the Northwest Semitic language family. It is essentially Canaanite, as is also, for example, Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Moabite. It was almost certainly the language, with possibly dialectical variations, of at least some of the inhabitants of what we know as Canaan when Abram first entered Canaan. He and his descendants would have learned it from the population of Canaan rather than having brought it with them from their native Mesopotamia, whether upper (northern) or lower (southern). Canaanite could be rendered into written form by means of more than one writing system, and was!
We know Hebrew in its alphabetic, or more properly, abjadic form, i.e. with symbols or characters that represent individual and discreet sounds/vocalics, all of which were, originally, consonantal. To us these symbols look like “letters,” which in a sense, they are. The people at Ugarit, however, though they spoke essentially the same language, used a set of 30 characters that were formed by the impression of a reed stylus into soft clay. They look to the unwary just like what we know as “cuneiform” writing. But they are not. They too are alphabetic/abjadic, like what we know as Hebrew, but written differently both with and on a different medium. But Canaanite can also be written used the true cuneiform system (of about 600 symbols), which is syllabic/ideographic. The best examples of this are to found among the 300 plus so-called Amarna Tablets, dating from the 14th century B.C., and found in Egypt at the site of ancient Ahketaten (Tell el-Amarna), although a few exemplars (mostly fragments) have been found in Palestine/Canaan.
Without a doubt, Canaanite was a language in use well before the time of Moses and, probably, well before the time of Abraham. Just because we do not have examples of Canaanite written with what we think of as “Hebrew letters” much before the 10th century B.C. by no means can be used to assert that Canaanite, or even Hebrew, was not known, spoken, and written well before that. Trying to prove otherwise by means of the negative, i.e., of absence, is a fool’s errand, and quite illogical.
what’s up wrote:
“My take is that the Merneptah Stele was inscribed when Israel was already well into taking the land (time of Judges) and so the Exodus was before this.”
You are probably correct on this point.
As for the rest of what you say, that is, which pharaoh or even which dynasty, it is dependent on which Egyptian chronology you use, whether high, middle, low, new or even as yet unstated. There is much uncertainty here, which those heavily invested in the received orthodoxy of the discipline are reluctant to admit or deal with. Scholarship, in whatever discipline, can be just as trendy and/or ossified as anything else. It is in the nature of man with both his fickleness and his pride.
You certainly have a fascinating life's journey! The bottom line for me is that it is both counter-intuitive and irrational to believe that order and complexity on an unimaginable scale such as we see in the world around us is the product of blind chance + time + matter - and absolutely nothing more.
I suspect that the standard "put a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters and they will eventually produce the Encyclopedia Brittanica" argument is fundamentally flawed. Au contraire: no matter how long the monkeys peck away, they will only reach a certain very rudimentary level of complexity, probably not even to the level of a recognizable sentence.
But no doubt you know all this. The other question is that of the justice of God in condemning people to Hell. I too have pondered this question for much of a lifetime, but have arrived at different conclusions.
First, let me say I was well-trained in typical Evangelical Protestant theology, meshing that later with doctoral studies in theology at a Jesuit University. So I know what the typical approach is regarding those who die in non-Christian lands.
My own view is that at the heart of every individual is a decision that is continually being made, and which has eternal consequences. I believe that in our heart of hearts, we are being prompted to respond to God. Is the answer "Yes" - or is the answer (to use the Latin) non serviam "I will not serve."
This decision is being made by all irrespective of time or culture, and our eternal destiny depends upon whether we submit to God and desire to serve and obey Him, or whether we refuse to do so.
But what about the necessity of accepting Christ as our personal Savior? If a person responds to the light that they have, I believe that God will have mercy upon them. If they have the opportunity to hear the Gospel, such a person will naturally respond and become a Christian. If they never have the opportunity to hear a clear presentation of the Gospel, I believe that God will have mercy upon their souls. The first chapters of the Book of Romans speaks to those who are without the law being judged according to how they have obeyed the "law in their hearts."
That brings us to your objection regarding those who die in far away non-Christian lands. No, God is not waiting to damn them forever: "God is not willing that any should perish." He will judge them according to "the deeds done in the flesh." I am not here speaking of "works righteousness," (none of us can "earn" our salvation) but rather a fundamental decision of the heart to love God and seek him. For the Book of Romans also speaks of the knowledge of God being present in each person.
Accordingly, I believe that there will be many more people in heaven than my theology (i.e., the theology of my church tradition) allows.
But that does not mean that everyone will find eternal salvation. If the answer of a person's heart is non serviam "I will not serve," they have closed their heart off to God. Such a person cannot be in the presence of God because they do not wish to be there.
The question of eternal damnation is for me a mystery. I know of thoughtful theologians of my tradition who have changed their view to accept the annihilation of the wicked. I find it troubling that some talk about Hellfire almost casually, not realizing the unspeakable horror of eternal torment.
I would like to believe in Universalism, but one thing made me realize it wouldn't quite work. You know the words to the song: "If there's a rock & roll heaven, well you know we gotta have a band..." I've heard talk like that about rock stars who die, as if heaven will have it's own little hip Greenwich Village, off to the side, where the unrepentant can "hang out" and do their thing while the "uncool" saints are off praising God.
The end of the Book of Revelation puts the lie to that fantasy, where it states that outside of the walls of the New Jerusalem are the unclean, etc. (long list of sins).
At root is my unshakable conviction that we serve a God of love and mercy, and that if someone persists in rebellion and does not find salvation, God will be utterly just in His judgment, and none of us who observe that judgment will have a shred of doubt regarding it.
All the best.
Thank you for your most informative post. I had studied much of that long ago but unfortunately the knowledge has long since “flown the coop.” In any event, the salient point is that there is no reason to dogmatically insist that the Israelites could not have possessed a form of writing prior to C10 BC. There is, as you suggest, every reason to believe that they had written language from their earliest history.
Bookmark
You’re welcome.
Agreed on the salient point.
“If I fell in love with a woman who did not love me back and refused to be with me does that make me any less loving?”
I think your analogy falls way short. If you fell in love with a woman who did not love you back, and you decided as a result to kidnap her and torture her to death, that would make you less loving. Would any reasonable person not deem you a monster?
It’s the new man that kidnaps and tortures her in my analogy. (Satan / Devil)
The man that loves her who she refused does all he can to prevent that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.