The Pharisees prided themselves on knowing the individual words of the Old Testament, yet they were not looking for the Messiah, they robbed widows instead of caring for the poor, and they loved money and prestige rather than God and people. Perhaps He did so to make clear that it is not the individual words that are important but the meaning and thrust of what was said. I suggest that perhaps God did that deliberately. Though the 3% is not very much, we might still wonder why God even allowed that 3% variation. So in summary, I do not believe an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God of truth allowed His word to be messed up. God is not obligated to protect people who foolishly test Him. However, the Bible also says we are not to test God in Matthew 5:7 and other places. (By the way, ever single teaching in the end of Mark is mentioned elsewhere, except the drinking of poison.) I have no problem with the end of Mark saying God is able to protect His obedient people when they drink poison, because God can protect people from poison, just as he can protect us from anything. I believe we can be sure of the meaning God intended, because these uncertainties do not significantly change the meaning. According to my studies, we are certain of 97% of every word in the New Testament, but that still leaves 3,912 words, with the end of Mark (166 words) being the largest place of uncertainty. However, I think part of what you are really asking is how we can trust the message in a book that has copyist errors in it. When someone, such as myself, says the Bible is inerrant, they mean the Bible is without any error in the original manuscripts and without significant error (infallible) today. Copyist errors do not affect the truth of what was originally said, copyist errors do not show an imperfect book came from a perfect God. Everything God said in the original manuscripts was true. But how does anyone know? We don’t have the original writings!Ī: God promised to preserve His word in Isaiah 55:10-11 59:21 1 Peter 1:24-25 and Matthew 24:35. Christians are told that these problems exist because of alleged "copyist errors," and that the "original writings" of the Bible are perfect. Q: How could an imperfect book come from a perfect God? As you read through the scriptures, there are a great number of footnotes that say that we can’t be sure if certain passages should be included. He did not translate the books of 1 and 2 Kings at all, because he thought the Goths were already too warlike. Being an Arian, one might think he would have a motive to either change the meaning, or at least use any Greek variants that had a meaning more favorable to his theology, yet, the meaning of his translation is identical to the Greek Bible with one notable exception. This was actually made by an Arian heretic Ufilas. One of the more interesting ones is Gothic. We have Bibles translated from Greek into other languages, including Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and Latin. For example, a ship could be said to be "baptized" if it was sunk.ģ. We have many non-religious Greek manuscripts, and we can see how most of the words in the New Testament were used in everyday language. They not only repeated what was in the Greek, they interpreted and explained it, and we can see how they understood the Greek.Ģ. We have extensive references to the Old and New Testaments in Greek and Latin among the church writers. One could bring up the issue of how do we know we have a correct understanding of the Greek language? There are three independent ways that we know.ġ. However that is not the end of the story. However, we have over 197 Greek manuscripts through the end of the sixth century, and if someone were to deliberately distort something in English (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses have), we can all see exactly where they distorted it. Q: How can we know the New Testament was translated reliably?Ī: We would have a problem if we did not have any Greek manuscripts of the original. If you want to see for a particular verse, the manuscript variations in different versions listed, a good source is The Greek New Testament : fourth revised edition by Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. 1999,2001.įor seeing the actual manuscripts themselves, if you do not want to travel to various museums, you can see photocopies of many pages in Manuscripts of the Greek Bible : An Introduction to Palaeography by Bruce M. Q: Where can we look at individual New Testament manuscripts ourselves?Ī: One of the best books for reading the actual Greek text, as well as discussion of the text, see The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts (A Corrected Enlarged Edition.) edited by Philip W.
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