S3 E5 TRANSCRIPT
THE PRESERVATION OF SCRIPTURE
INTRODUCTION
Hello everyone and welcome to Spirit-Led Hope. My name is Glenn Erichsen, and in this episode, we are looking at:
THE PRESERVATION OF SCRIPTURE
In the last episode we discussed how we got the Bible. We looked at ancient methods of writing and we stated that the original words of the Old and New Testaments were recorded primarily on papyrus and leather. We then realized that because leather and papyrus are perishable, this means that we no longer have the original documents written by the prophets and apostles.
The original documents, which we call autographs, were written thousands of years ago. All we have today are copies of copies.
This can create some angst for Christians, and it is often used by critics to cast doubt upon the contents of the Bible. By the end of this episode, I hope to calm any fears you might have that we cannot trust what is written in our Bibles.
Before we get started, I want to say that for this episode, I am very grateful for John Frame’s book on systematic theology. He has a chapter called “From God’s Lips to Our Ears,” and it really made me think about what we are covering in this episode.
DOCUMENTS VERSUS TEXT
Let us take a couple of minutes and go back in time to when the very first pages of the Bible were written. We know from Scripture, that each of the writers of the Bible were carried along by the Holy Spirit and began to record the words God wished us to read. It is very possible that the writers made rough drafts, or notes as they responded to the actions of the Holy Spirit. Many of the authors, most likely dictated their words to a secretary or scribe. We see this with Paul in the New Testament and in the last episode we mentioned Baruch doing this for the prophet Jeremiah.
We do not know how long it took for each writer to finish their part. But when the writers were satisfied that the document was accurate and complete it was either read out loud, sent as a letter, or distributed in some way. That is the moment it became an autograph. In other words, it is that document that we say is without error. It is that document that we no longer have. We only have copies of it.
So why is this not a crisis for us? To answer that, we need to point out the distinction between the document and the words on the document. When we say that the autographs are without error, what we are really saying is that the words of the autographs, or the text, is without error. In a sense, we do not care about the piece of leather or papyrus on which it is written, we care about the words.
This is an important principle, and it is something that was understood by the ancients. Here is what Moses said in Deuteronomy 4:2 about God’s words given through him:
You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you.
Deuteronomy 4:2 ESV
Moses put on an emphasis on the words. What we find, is that all of Scripture puts an emphasis on the words of God. It is the words captured by the text, not the method of storing and transmitting, that is critical.
This means, that if the words are faithfully reproduced, any copy still carries the authority of the original.
Think about this podcast. I post each episode to my podcast host, and then people all around the world can either stream it or download it to an electronic device. Let us say that three people download this episode…one person is in Everett, Washington, another is in Homestead, Florida, and a third one is in Hong Kong. Assuming that their internet connection is stable, each one of these three people has something that is just as good as the original audio recording and transcript that I have on my PC. They can share their copies with others, and it will be no different than if I handed out my originals.
The same principle is true with the Biblical autographs. If they are copied correctly, every copy is just as inspired and God-breathed as the original.
CAN COPIES HAVE MISTAKES?
Now all of this raises a big question. Is it possible that mistakes were made when copying the autographs of the Bible? And the answer is, yes. Nowhere, does God promise us that copies will be made exactly like the original.
Here is where we enter unknown territory. It is fully possible that God could have chosen to perfectly preserve the autographs so that we always have the originals. Or he could have guaranteed that every copy was made perfectly. But this is not what God chose to do. God chose to write the Bible through imperfect people, and he chose to have imperfect people make copies of the autographs, and copies of copies.
We do not know the mind of God and his complete reasoning for working through flawed people. But we know that this is what he does. And yet, we also know that somehow the Bible has reached us thousands of years after it was written, with the heart of its message intact.
How God did this, we do not know. But Job said it well when he said this of God:
I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
Job 42:2 ESV
God desires to speak to us, and nothing has or can prevent that from happening.
NOT THE TELEPHONE GAME
One of the things that critics of the Bible will often say, is that there is no way the Bible can be accurate today because of the telephone game. If you have never played the telephone game, it is a party game where a group of people sit in a circle. One person whispers a phrase into the ear of the person to the left of them, and that person is expected to repeat it by whispering into the ear of the person to their left until the message goes around the circle and gets back to the originator. Because parties are loud, and people are laughing, the whispered words at the end of the circle are often humorously different than at the start.
Critics may say that in the same way, making copies of copies will undoubtedly introduce multiple major errors into the Bible. But this is not the case and here is why. What if you played the telephone game a little differently? What if each person verified that they understood what was whispered to them before they repeated it? This game would be radically different and the chances very high that the end expression would match the beginning.
That is more representative of how the Bible was copied in ancient times. Scribes carefully copied the text and used methods to double check that what they had done was correct. Were some errors made? Yes, some were made. But the types of errors were understandable and not significant to the meaning of the whole text.
TEXTUAL CRITICISM
If we do not have the original writings of Scripture, how do we know what kind of mistakes were made? In fact, how can we even be sure that we know with certainty what the autographs said? This is where we need to talk about the art and science of textual criticism, and more specifically, what is called lower criticism. Lower criticism looks at the text itself. We are not going to talk about higher criticism, but that looks at things like the authorship of a book of the Bible and the date it was written and other things like that.
Lower criticism is, in many ways, an exercise of logic and reason. But from what I can see, there is an art to it as well. I am not an expert in textual criticism, so I am not going to try and teach it in a podcast like this. But I understand it well enough to know that it provides a very high certainty that we know what was written in the original writings. Let me give you an example of how it works.
Let us imagine that we had someone’s diary as an original document, and we asked 10 people to make one copy by hand. And here we are not allowing the use of a spell checker or anything like that. Each copyist is motivated to make a good copy. In other words, they care about doing it right. After they are done, we have 10 copies of the original, and we are going to label those copies A through J.
Now, let us imagine that we are going to ask 10 people to copy the copy we labeled A, 10 people to copy the copy we labeled B, and so forth. And again, these people cannot use a word processor and they are highly motivated to do a good job. They are trying to make the copy right.
When we are all done, we have the original, the 10 copies of the original, and the 10 copies of each copy. That gives us a total of 110 copies of the original diary.
Now let us set aside the original, which we have never read, and remove any labels on the copies, and copies of the copies. To make it more interesting, let us shuffle the 110 copies together. We will make it harder for ourselves by assuming that all copyists used the same type of paper and pen. Of course, their handwriting is different. Our job now is to read the 110 copies and do our best to determine what the text of the original diary says. To do this, we will use textual criticism.
Obviously, the longer the diary is, the more work we have in front us. But you can imagine that if you and I work together, we can begin to see patterns. For example, I noticed that one of my diaries has a paragraph about Oreo the cat, but another does not. After looking for the paragraph in all copies, we find that 11 of the copies are missing the part about Oreo.
What do we conclude from this? We can, with a high-level of confidence, say that one of the original copies A through J, accidentally missed that paragraph and so it never showed up in the following copies.
Let us say that you noticed something less obvious. On one copy, you read a sentence that said, “I went two the store today.” And you notice that the word “two” is spelled incorrectly as t, w, o instead of t, o. But on another copy, you see the word “to” spelled correctly. Again, we look at all the copies and we find that 11 of them are spelled t, o, and 99 are spelled t, w, o.
What do we conclude from that? And this is where the art comes in because we need to do some conjecture along with logical thinking. It seems very possible that one of the A through J copyists either by habit substituted the correct spelling, or even decided to fix the error for readability. We do not know, but it could have been intentional whereas the missing part about Oreo was probably accidental.
As we keep doing our investigation, we find that in one section, there are agreements in blocks of eleven. In other words, 11 of the copies say one thing, another 11 say something different, and so on. In a case like that, we conclude that there is something that the A through J copyists just could not figure out or agree on.
Now we also find that even though we were able to group our copies into blocks of 11, the 11 in each block do not all agree. There are periods and commas in different places. There are spelling differences and little things here and there like a word missing. But just like before, when we compare all the copies to these areas of disagreement, we find that we can make some logical assumptions about what the original contains.
And sure enough, after we decide what the original looks like, we get a chance to compare our results to the real thing. Although not perfect, we did quite well because of our sample size. We also learn why the A through J copyists disagreed on one section. When we go to look at it, we find the paper stained by an apparent coffee spill. We can take our own guess at what it means, but it does not look like we will ever know for sure. But fortunately, based on what we can discern, it looks like that area was not significant to the contents of the whole diary.
What I just described is a very simple example of textual criticism. But when it comes to the Bible, the principles are the same. If you have enough copies, you can have high confidence in what the original document says, even if it has been gone for ages.
And here is an important point, there are many copies of the Bible and portions of it. There are also many older writings that quote Scripture. There are so many that there is nothing else like it in ancient literature. Not only are there many copies, but there are also translations into other languages. That does add more complexity, but it also provides more information.
Do we believe that we can reproduce 100 percent of the original writings of the Old and New Testaments? No, we do not. But do we have high confidence that we know the heart of it? Yes, we do! We can be confident that in some way, through the work of flawed people, God has preserved his words to us. The original documents may be gone, but the words of the text remain.
IMPERFECT PEOPLE…PERFECT GOD
If you have been listening to this whole Season, you by now may have recognized a theme. The theme is simple…a perfect God works through imperfect people. When we realize how important the Bible is to God’s revelation of himself to us, it is almost shocking that God would trust humans to participate with him.
Not only has God used the Bible writers and those who copied the Bible to advance his word, he also uses us. And maybe you have not thought about this before. It can be easy for us to think that God’s revelation of himself was finished by the writers of Scripture and those who preserved it. And that is true, but there is something else. I am not saying that we are going to add anything to Scripture about who God is and his nature. God has already presented that in the Bible.
But I am saying that we are called to be living demonstrations that what God says is true. Our lives are meant to reveal God to others, and to show that the Bible is not a musty old book. Our lives should show the truth of Scripture and join it in pointing to Jesus.
When people see that we are led by the Holy Spirit and are transformed to be a people of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control…they want to know more about what is in that book and who God is. That is one of many things we are called to do.
Yes, we are imperfect, but the Holy Spirit works within us, with us, and through us, to accomplish his plans. Remember, he is never thwarted even though we may mess up. We just need to keep taking steps as we are led by his Spirit.
CLOSING
In our next episode, I believe we are going to look at some of the Bible manuscripts in existence today… but that could change.
As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please email me at glenn@spiritledhope.com, or simply use the Contact Form at spiritledhope.com. That is spiritLEDhope.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
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And now, from one imperfect person to another, here are God’s perfect words for you:
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Until next episode, take care.
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