Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
My last column addressed the objection that says the Bible can’t be trusted because of how often it has been translated and hand-copied through the centuries.
My point was that the documented history (in over 5,000 ancient manuscripts) shows the result is really the opposite. That is, the many manuscripts, from different centuries and regions, prove there has been stunning consistency over the last 2,500 or so years. By comparing old ones with newer ones, we can see plainly where any copyist errors or bad translations were made.
This is not something that only Evangelical scholars believe. Renowned atheist scholar, Bart Erhman, agrees: You may hate what it says, but there’s no denying that the New Testament we possess today is the same as the one possessed by the church in the first several centuries of Christianity.
This raises a question about translations of the Bible. If we admit that humans can and do make errors when translating from, say, Hebrew into English or Spanish, what does that say about the reliability of our modern translations? Well, it means that a translation that compares well with all the ancient data, being fundamentally faithful, can be trusted.
It means that a decent translation of the Bible into your native tongue can and should be received as the inspired word of God. It doesn’t mean, though, that we must believe in perfect or infallible translations. It just means that you will come across places in your study where it will be helpful to compare the translation you’re reading with others. Most modern Bibles, in fact, point this out with little notes explaining there is some question about which is the better English word in this place or another.
The historic, Protestant view is that inspiration resides in the original Scripture as it was first written. When Paul signed his name to one of his letters, that autographed copy is what was inspired. Inspiration didn’t extend to the hand-written copies that were made. However, it is precisely because of those copies that it’s reasonable to say, though we no longer have those originals, we know what they said. The relatively few places where we have any doubt at all about a word or phrase, the choice is generally between two options, neither of which change any Bible doctrines at all.
The Bible itself treats translations in this manner: a faithful translation may be considered the word of the Lord. When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, it overwhelmingly quotes from the ancient Greek translation of the original Hebrew, and freely calls the Greek rendering God’s word.
We have to keep in mind which documents were inspired: the originals. No translation has to be considered specially inspired in order for us to trust that we have the word of God with us. A plethora of basically faithful translations helps us in this regard, since they can be compared with each other, and with all the ancient documents.
The bottom line is, though we don’t possess the original letters of Peter, for instance, your modern Bible tells you what that original said, and there is no evidence-based reason to doubt this.
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: