Manoa Valley Church
June 18, 2006

Dr. Kent Keith

Which Bible?

© Copyright Kent M. Keith 2006

Good morning!

This is the third in a series of five sermons that I will be giving this summer. The first one was about our core beliefs-a review of the creeds and statements of faith that have been and are still an important part of our journey as the body of Christ. The second one was about the difference between faith and beliefs-how our faith is about our confidence and trust in God, while our beliefs are our descriptions of God. Our faith can be unshakeable, even as our beliefs change due to new spiritual insights. Today I will talk about the Bible. The next time, two weeks from now, I will discuss the Second Coming, the end times, and the rapture. The final sermon in the series will be on worshipping Christ and following Jesus.

Last fall, I came across an article in a Christian magazine that noted that there are many versions of the Bible being published today. The article asked the question: Which Bible can we Christians trust as the Word of God?

I had no idea how to answer that question. Then, three months ago, I took a course on biblical theology that gave me some background that has given me a new way of looking at the question. This morning I will be sharing some of what I have learned.

First and foremost, there is good news about the Good News. The good news is that the Bibles that are in our pews today are more accurate, and closer to the original words of the biblical writers, than the Bibles that were in our pews 50 years ago. Our bibles are more authoritative than ever before.

Why is this the case? It is the result of the discovery of thousands of manuscripts and centuries of intense scholarship. Hundreds of biblical scholars and translators have been involved in a massive effort to identify and then translate the most authoritative texts. It has been an exciting and complex detective story.

Here's how the story begins. We believe that the Bible is the Word of God. The Bible came from God, and was written down by men inspired by God. Unfortunately, we do not have any original "autograph" manuscripts of the scriptures written by those inspired men. For example, we do not have any original gospels handwritten by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, nor any original letters handwritten by Paul. What we have are copies of copies of copies of the original manuscripts.

Even many of the early copies no longer exist, because they were written on papyrus-thin strips of the pith of the papyrus plant that were soaked, pressed, and dried for use as writing material. The early church was poor, and papyrus was the cheapest and most common writing material of its day. It was fragile, and did not last very long. Beginning sometime around the 4th century A.D., when the church became legal in the eyes of the empire and acquired some resources, copies of the gospels were written on parchment. Parchment was made from animal skins, and it was more expensive. It was stronger, smoother, and survived for longer periods of time.

Most scholars believe that the earliest parts of the New Testament to be written down were the letters of Paul, written sometime between 50 A.D. and 60 A.D., a generation or so after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The four gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John are believed to have been written later, between 70 A.D. and 100 A.D., two or three generations after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The New Testament was written in Greek. The oldest Greek manuscripts date back to the second century-100 A.D. to 199 A.D. They were written on scrolls. Scrolls are basically sheets that are attached to each other to form one long page that is rolled up. Some scholars think that Matthew and Luke didn't use all the material available to them in the earlier gospel of Mark, because it wouldn't all fit on even the largest scroll. Eventually, the writings were collected into a kind of book known as a codex. A codex consisted of sheets that were folded over each other, forming pages that had writing on both sides. Almost all known manuscripts of the New Testament are in this codex form.

While the original scriptures were inspired by God, the scribes who copied those scriptures over the centuries were human, and we human beings are prone to error. This is the subject of a best-selling religious book by Bart Ehrman entitled Misquoting Jesus. The book is not actually about misquoting Jesus. It is about all the accidental and intentional changes in the bible made by scribes over the centuries.

In the early days of Christianity, literacy rates were low. Most of the early Christians were poor and could not read. We assume that the gospels and the letters of Paul were read out loud to church members. Many of the scriptures would have been memorized and passed from Christian to Christian. When the scriptures were written down, they were probably written down by church leaders who were not professional copyists.

A lot of bibles were copied during the middle ages. Just imagine monks standing in shadowy, candle-lit rooms in a medieval monastery, copying the Bible day after day. Scholars say that the words were written in all upper-case letters with no spaces between them, so it wasn't always clear where a word started or ended. Sometimes, when two lines of scripture began or ended with the same word, a scribe would accidentally skip the first line, and go directly to the second line, leaving out a whole line of words in between. At other times, a scribe would write a note on the side of the manuscript, and later, another scribe would assume that the note was to be inserted in the text, so he would add it in. Some words looked very much alike, and a scribe could accidentally choose the wrong one. In short, there were lots of errors.

In addition to accidental changes, scholars like Bart Ehrman argue that the scribes made intentional changes. The scribes may have wanted to smooth out the language, or reconcile one passage of the Bible with another, or add an explanatory phrase, or change a few words that caused doctrinal problems. Scribes may also have had their own editorial preferences and theological views which influenced their copying.

Remember that the printing press was not invented until 1456. For 1,400 years, each copy of the Bible had to be hand copied. That meant that each copy of the Bible could be different from every other copy, because each copy could have its own specific errors. I remember having this problem myself, decades ago, when I was writing articles and papers using a manual typewriter. If I made mistakes I could not erase or blot out, I had to type my article or paper again. The next time I typed it, I made sure to correct the earlier mistakes, but I might make some new mistakes that I didn't make the first time. Even today, with word processors, I can make mistakes editing a document, so that I inadvertently leave out a word or include the same word twice. I am living proof that human error is always with us.

Now-in terms of the Bible, the big question for our scholarly detectives is: Which manuscripts are the most authentic? Which have the fewest errors from accidental copying mistakes, and which have the fewest changes due to the editorial or doctrinal preferences of the scribes? In other words-which manuscripts are the closest to the original words of the inspired writers of the Bible?

Scholars use external and internal evidence to establish the most authentic texts. They look at the age and genealogy of the text as well as quotations from the early church fathers who wrote about the scriptures. Scholars apply rules of internal criticism. For example, scholars believe that the shorter version of a text is probably more authentic, because the scribes were more likely to add words than to subtract them. They also believe that the more difficult reading-the one that is harder to understand-is probably more authentic, because the scribes were more likely to simplify the meaning than to make it more complicated.

One caution is that the earliest manuscripts are not always the most authentic. An earlier manuscript may have had many errors, while a later one may have been copied accurately from a chain of manuscripts that had few errors.

In 1707, biblical scholar John Mill published an edition of the Greek New Testament that documented as many as 30,000 variations in the texts of the one hundred Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that were available to him. Today, three hundred years later, there are even more manuscripts and variations known to us. In fact, today, we have approximately 5,700 Greek manuscripts, most of them fragments but some of them continuous-text manuscripts of the entire New Testament. The number of variations between all these texts may be in the hundreds of thousands.

However, careful examination by scholars has revealed that most of the differences between these thousands of manuscripts are minor differences. Scholars seem to agree that seven eighths of the text of the New Testament is certain, and variations in the final eighth are not significant in terms of fundamental Christian doctrines or the overall sense of each biblical passage. Considering how old the Bible is, and how many copies exist, that is remarkable indeed.

Now, in addition to the challenges of copying and recopying, there are the challenges that come with translation. To be really accurate, when we refer to "the Bible," we are really referring to the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. Those were the original languages. Every Bible in any other language is a translation.

Some of the translations of the New Testament are better today than centuries ago because scholars have discovered more Greek texts from the first and second centuries A.D. that were not biblical manuscripts. These non-biblical texts have given scholars a better idea of how certain Greek words were used by everyday people during the time of the apostles. This has helped them understand what the biblical writers meant when they used certain words in the scriptures.

Scholars talk about two theories of translation. One is the theory of formal correspondence, which is an attempt to make the most direct, word-for-word translation that one can make. This gets the reader as close as possible to the original Hebrew or Greek text. The other theory is called dynamic equivalence, which is an attempt to convey the meaning to today's reader without worrying about the word order and vocabulary of the original text. Each of these approaches has advantages. The best advice is therefore to look at more than one translation when you are studying a specific passage in the Bible.

As you know, you can purchase what is called a parallel Bible, a book that provides several Bible translations side by side. An example is Today's Parallel Bible, which includes the King James Version, New International Version, the New American Standard Bible (Updated Edition), and the New Living Translation. The publisher's preface refers to these four translations as "four of today's most widely read and well respected translations." The King James version is described as "beloved for four centuries." The New International Version or NIV, which is what we have in our pews here at Manoa Valley Church, is described as the best-selling modern English Bible translation. The New Living Translation is cited as the best-selling simple English translation, and the New American Standard Bible is described as "the most widely accepted contemporary word-for-word translation."

Years ago, most Christians considered the King James version of the Bible to be the only Bible. While it is still beloved, the King James Version is no longer relied upon the way it used to be. The reason is that the King James version was not based on the best Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Here's how it happened.

The first complete edition of the Greek New Testament to be published and sold was prepared by the famous humanist scholar, Erasmus of Holland. It was published in 1516, and it came to be known as the "Textus Receptus" or the received text, which was used for the next 300 years.

Erasmus prepared the text in a hurry. In fact, he said that his Greek New Testament was "rushed out rather than edited." His publisher was trying to get his edition out into the marketplace before a competitor could distribute an edition that was already printed but not yet approved for sale by the Pope. So Erasmus prepared his edition in only five months, using whatever Greek texts were most conveniently available to him. Those texts were late medieval texts, written eleven hundred years after the originals, plus a manuscript borrowed from a friend, and part of the Latin Vulgate translated back into Greek. It was this very hurried edition that later became the basis for the English King James Version, which was published in 1611 and subsequently revised a number of times.

At about that time, in the early seventeenth century, the Codex Alexandrinus arrived in England. It was a fifth century manuscript, much earlier than the ones used by Erasmus, and it varied in many ways from the text that Erasmus produced. Scholars were struck by the differences, and they began to look at other Greek texts. In 1831, Karl Lachmann published the first Greek New Testament not based on the Textus Receptus of Erasmus. That was the beginning of a period of scholarship and controversy that has continued up until today.

Today, most English-speaking churches do not use the King James Version, but rather the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, or the popular NIV, the New International Version that we have in our pews. This shift away from the King James version is a dramatic change in only 50 years. However, it is good news about the good news. The NIV that we use today is more accurate than the King James Version that many of us grew up with. By the way, the NIV involved more than 100 scholars working over 25 years at a cost of $2 million. It was a major achievement.

I have seen a bumper sticker that says: God said it, I believe it, that settles it. I agree that God said it and we believe it, but that doesn't quite settle it. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, but we don't have the original inspired words, and those original inspired words were not in English. Fortunately, we are now closer than we have ever been to those original inspired words, but we should approach the Bible with some humility. There is more than one reputable method of translating the Bible, and therefore more than one reputable translation. Above all, we need to remember that we don't worship the Bible, we worship the God who is revealed through the Bible. The Bible is not God. The Bible is God's Holy Word. It is the revelation he wants to share with us.

So which Bible should you use? Use the one that helps you feel the presence of God. Use the one that speaks to you more directly than any another. Use the one that conveys a sense of the sacred, while drawing you into its message. Use the one through which you believe that God is revealing himself to you.

I grew up with the lofty language of the King James Version. However, it seemed much too formal and stilted to me. On the other hand, some of the "street talk" versions of the Bible did not appeal to me-they didn't seem to have the dignity of a sacred book. The New International Version was an exciting discovery for me, because it was easy to read, and yet it had the dignity and poetry of a sacred book. It drew me in. When I found it, I sat down and read the New Testament, from front to back, for the first time in my life. It is still the Bible I read the most often, and the Bible I quote in my own writing. I check other translations, to broaden my understanding, but the NIV is the one that I rely on the most.

But I know that the best translation for me may not be the best one for somebody else. God knows that each of us is a little different. It does not surprise me that there is more than one reputable translation, more than one way for us to understand the Word of God. That simply gives God more than one way to speak to us, and more than one way for us to listen to him.

So-which Bible should you use? Use the one through which you most clearly hear the voice of God, beckoning you to be closer to him. Use the one that draws you in, to know and love him better.

Let us pray.

Lord, we thank you for your Word, the Holy Bible. We thank you for revealing yourself to us through the Scriptures, so that we may know and love you better. We thank you for the scholars and translators who have worked for centuries to bring us the most authoritative bibles we have ever had. We ask that you be with us each and every time we read and pray on your Holy Word. In Jesus name, Amen.

 

Manoa Valley Church