Probable "Cause?" Why the Difference in Translations of Matthew 5:22? Part 2--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Last week, we began to discuss the history of how the Bible has come from the pens of the original authors down through the years to us today. We talked about the important doctrine called inerrancy, which is the belief that the original documents of Scripture contained no errors and no lies. Now, to our knowledge, the original pieces of paper on which the Bible was written no longer exist, because they’ve simply worn out over time. Don’t let that thought trouble you, however, because basically no pieces of paper from that long ago still exist—they’ve worn out and disintegrated.

            I’ll bet some of you have a book that was owned by your grandparents, and I’ll bet that book has at least started to wear out. Now consider this—your grandparents’ book has probably been in your house, which means its likely been out of direct sunlight that could have caused it to fade. Also, for several decades at least, its been in an air-conditioned room, which means it was in relatively low humidity. And yet, its still at least started to wear out. Well, now imagine pieces of paper from 2,000-4,000 years ago that didn’t have those advantages. As we would expect, they would just wear out.

            So, to the best of our knowledge, the original documents of Scripture no longer exist, but what we do possess are copies of the Bible—in fact, we have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of copies of the Bible from over the centuries, some of which were written relatively soon after the original documents were written.

            Now as I also mentioned last week, those copies of the Bible don’t always agree about how a certain verse should be worded—which leaves us with questions like our question about Matthew 5:22 that led to this whole discussion. Today, we’re going to talk more about those differences. We’ll discover that those differences affect a relatively small number of verses and none of them undermine any central point of the Christian faith. In other words, we don’t find some copies that say, “Jesus rose from the dead” and other copies that say, “Ha ha—just kidding, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.” But there are differences that exist between these copies, and critics of Christianity love to point that out, but we’ll see today that we really have no reason to be concerned about the text of the Bible that we hold in our hands in our copies today.

            Our discussion today is going to focus on the copies of the New Testament. The Old Testament has its own history since it has been preserved by two religions—Judaism and Christianity. Also, critics of Christianity really don’t pick on the Old Testament that much. If you hear someone on The History Channel talking about errors in the copies of the Bible, they will almost certainly be talking about the New Testament, so that’s what we will focus on today.

            Let’s return now to the outline that I introduced last week. Point #1 was this—the original documents of Scripture were written without any errors. We’ll move now to…

2. As people began to copy the original documents, they sometimes made innocent mistakes or inserted words to help clarify a statement.

            What kind of mistakes are we talking about? Let’s discuss a few…

a. Mistakes in spelling

            In many cases, this was probably the result of a copyist confusing letters that look very similar. Think about how easy it would be in English to confuse two “v”’s that are side-by-side with a “w.”

b. Eyes jumping down the page of the original copy

            We commit that mistake ourselves at times, and it would have been easier for some copyists to make that mistake since the earliest copies of Scripture were written INALLCAPITALLETTERSWITH NOSPACESBETWEENTHEWORDS.

c. Confusing different letters or words that sound similar

            We know from historical records that people would sometimes read the text of Scripture and have several people copy it at once. That’s a little more efficient in a situation when everything has to be copied by hand, but that introduces the possibility of some other mistakes. Imagine if we were copying an English document that way and we came to the word “there” or the word “to.” Think about how often people misspell those words!

d. Faulty memory

            By this I mean a copyist forgetting something during the time it takes to look at the original copy and then write out what was on that page. This would seem to account for some of the differences in minor details that we see between some copies.

Now my outline also noted deliberate insertions that were sometime made in the text, so what kind of insertions are we talking about?

a. Changes in spelling and grammar

            Think about the way that English is spoken differently even within our own country. In some places, people say “pop,” but in other places they say “soda.” In some places, its fine to say “ain’t” even though English teachers don’t like it. Well, the same situation was true with the Greek in the New Testament, and in some copies we see copyists cleaning up spelling or grammar that apparently seemed wrong to them.

b. Changes to harmonize stories found in more than one book

            In the gospels in particular, we find stories that are recorded in more than one book, but frequently the authors emphasized and included different details. But sometimes, we find copyists who were apparently trying to make Luke and Matthew’s account of a story read exactly the same, so they added a detail from Matthew’s account into Luke’s account or vice versa.

c. The addition of words frequently found together

            The most common example of this kind of addition is with the words “Lord Jesus Christ.” You’re probably familiar with some verses that refer to the Son of God simply as Jesus or as Christ or as the Christ. Well, some copyists had a habit of writing out Lord Jesus Christ in all of those verses, even if their original copy didn’t necessarily have all of those words.

d. Changes made for doctrinal sensitivity

            We see a clear example of this in the birth narratives of Christ, where some copyists made slight changes to avoid calling Joseph the father of Jesus. Apparently, their concern was to remind us that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus and that Jesus, or course, was born of a virgin.

e. Addition of miscellaneous details

            This habit has produced some humorous results in various copies of Scripture. For example, in Revelation 4:8, when the living creatures in Heaven sing, “holy, holy, holy,” a few manuscripts have the creatures singing “holy” four times, six times, eight times, or all the way up to 13 times!

            The title of the Book of Revelation has also been expanded in some copies over time. The earliest copies simply call it “The Revelation of John.” Later, after John was declared a saint by the Catholic Church, some copyists changed it to “The Revelation of St. John. Eventually, there was one over-achieving copyist who called it “The Revelation of the all-glorious Evangelist, bosom friend of Jesus, beloved to Christ, John the theologian, son of Salome and Zebedee, but adopted son of Mary the Mother of God, and Son of Thunder!”

            Now, it is very important to realize that we don’t even find notable mistakes and insertions in very many verses of Scripture. Let me explain—in the Greek New Testament that has been compiled by comparing all of the ancient copies with each other, there are 138,020 words. In that whole document, there are only 10,000 places where notable differences exist between the ancient copies. That ratio equates to roughly 1% of the text. In other words, for 99% of the text of the New Testament, there are no notable differences between the ancient copies. That’s an incredible fact when you consider that we have over 5,000 ancient manuscripts of the Bible!

Even for that 1% of the text, point #3 of our outline is true…

3. By comparing the numerous ancient copies of Scripture that we possess, we can spot those mistakes and insertions and correct them.

            When there is a notable difference between the ancient copies of the New Testament, we are normally left with a situation like what I’ve portrayed in your bulletin handout for today. Normally, we will find many manuscripts that have exactly the same reading. Then, we will find some that have some of the various mistakes or insertions that we just discussed.

            Now notice one thing about my little illustration here—do you still get the same basic message from all of these statements? Of course you do! So for this very small percentage of the text where we find a notable difference between the copies, our doubt really isn’t about the message of the verse, just the exact, original wording of the verse. Also, its not that we’ve lost the original words of Scripture—one of the variations surely must capture the original wording, we’re just less than 100% sure about which variation that is.

            So remember, we’re only talking about 1% of the text—about 10,000 places. And in the vast majority of those places, we have a high degree of certainty about which of the variations captures the original wording. Evangelical scholar Norman Geisler concludes that there are only 40 places out of those 10,000 where we truly have significant doubt about which variation captures the original wording. We know one of them must, we’re just really not sure which one. And again, we’re only talking about 40 places out of the entire New Testament. As Dr. Geisler likes to say, we have 100% of the text, and we are sure about 99.5% of it.¹

So for that small number of places, point #4 of our outline is true…

4. In some verses, the exact wording of the original documents remains uncertain. This uncertainty is one factor that lies behind the differences we find between translations.

            These differences show up primarily between the King James and New King James Version on the one hand and new translations such as the English Standard Version on the other. When the King James Version was written in 1611, the translators obviously could only work with the Greek manuscripts that had been discovered at that time. In the 400 years since then, archaeologists have discovered many more manuscripts, and newer translations have been able to take those into account when they make decisions about that small number of places where we find significant differences.

            This is not to say that the King James and New King James Versions are poor translations—not at all! Remember, we’re talking about a very small number of places, and its possible in some of those places that the King James has it right and the newer translations have it wrong!

            So how should we sum up all of this information? First, we must acknowledge that there are differences between the ancient copies of the New Testament. That’s true, and we need to acknowledge that its true. We need to get out ahead of skeptics who only mention this tiny part of the whole picture. Some people have their faith shaken when they learn about these differences because they learn about them from a skeptic who only mentions part of the story. Worse yet, some people conclude that their church has been deliberately hiding this information from them. All of this confusion is totally unnecessary because Christians have nothing to hide about the Bible, especially after we hear the whole story.

            So yes, there are differences between the ancient copies of Scripture, but the vast majority of them are insignificant. They consist of spelling mistakes and other mistakes that are easily spotted and corrected when we compare the ancient copies with one another. And among the 40 or so places where we do have a fair degree of uncertainty about the wording of the original text, we know we possess the original wording in one of the copies, and none of those instances undermine a core doctrine of the Christian faith. We don’t find copies making different claims about the virgin birth of Christ, the deity of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, or salvation by grace through faith.

            Let me address one final question that arises from this whole discussion—why did God allow people to make mistakes as they copied the Bible? Why didn’t He just see to it that the copyists did their work perfectly? I think the answer is this—the fact that we do not find 100% uniformity between all the copies actually disproves a claim that many people have made about the Bible, namely, that there was a deliberate conspiracy in the past to change the teaching of the Bible. The fact that we find mistakes actually disproves that claim. Let me explain what I mean.

            Think about the difference between the produce that you grow in your garden and the produce that you see in the grocery store. When you harvest produce from your garden—say, tomatoes, for example—they don’t all look exactly the same, do they? They will be slightly different sizes and slightly different colors and some of them will have some flaws.

            But when you see tomatoes in the grocery store, what do you find? They all look exactly the same—they’re the same color, the same size, and the same shape. That uniformity tells us that there was a lot of human manipulation in the process of bringing those tomatoes to the grocery store. Someone threw out all the imperfect tomatoes and shipped out only the ones they wanted to have on display.

            Now, the fact that we don’t see complete uniformity in the copies of Scripture tells us that there has been no human manipulation over the copying process. If there was ever a conspiracy to change the message of Scripture, we would find uniformity in the copies because the conspirators would have destroyed all of the copies that they deemed imperfect. The history of the Bible as it stands shows us that there has never been centralized, human control over its copying and preservation.

            But consider this, even without that kind of centralized, human control over the copying process, we have received a Bible today that has no notable differences in over 99% of the text. I think we can conclude that God was overseeing the process, and He did so in a way that disproves the claims of those who want to attack the Bible.

            In the end, we can echo the words of the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians 1:20—“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Indeed He has!

Notes

1. Norman Geisler, When Skeptics Ask, p. 160.