Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
“Pastor, how can you believe in the Bible when it’s been translated so many times?”
That’s a common objection. Meaning no insult, but it’s an argument based on ignorance. The objector doesn’t know anything about how the Bible came to be and assumes the worst: a shadowy history littered with corruptions both accidental and nefarious.
It’s assumed that we got the Scriptures through a process much like the old party game, “Phone Message.”
In that game, you line up several children in a row. A long sentence is told to the first child. He takes off running, around a cone, and then comes back and whispers the sentence he was told to the next kid. When you get to the last child, there’s the punchline. You have the last one recite what he thinks he heard, and everybody gets a good laugh at how mangled the message has become, compared to what the first child was actually told.
People think we got the Bible that way. Or, they assume the process is something like making old Xerox copies, and then making copies of the copies, until the document is ugly and hard to read.
But if I write a book in English and then three friends translate my book into their native languages (say French, Spanish, and German) that has no effect on the book I wrote. None at all. It still says what it says when I typed the words, “The End.”
Now, one of the friends may have made some translational errors. Maybe he’s not so great at English after all. OK, that’s not hard to spot, because eventually we’ll run across someone who knows both languages and can highlight the errors. So what should be done? We just make a new translation, hoping to improve on previous efforts. We still have the original book for making comparisons.
In that process, no matter how many times it’s repeated, it doesn’t change what was originally written. The same is true for making hand-written copies: as long as we have the source document, we can spot inaccuracies and correct our work.
There are in existence right now over 5,000 ancient manuscripts of Scripture and lots of ancient translations into other languages. In some cases, the source documents we’re working with date to several hundred years B.C.
We have copies from many time periods and geographical regions. We have enough to say with certainty that the Phone Message game is not what happened here. How do we know?
Because the older copies say the same thing, overwhelmingly, as all the later copies. The medieval era Latin carries the same message as the Hebrew and Greek from 300 A.D. If somebody made huge errors along the way, or the Council of Nicea (for instance) had forced a bunch of wholesale changes, that would be very easy to spot.
We have all the receipts, as the kids say. We can spot all the issues, like missing words, misspellings, and transposed numbers. There are modern English translations that will even show you where all those places are.
Nobody’s hiding any of this. There’s no need. You have the Bible God intended.
Gordan Runyan is pastor of Tucumcari’s Immanuel Baptist Church and author of “Radical Moses: The Amazing Civil Freedom Built into Ancient Israel.” Contact him at: