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NASB | Romans 10:17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Romans 10:17 So faith comes from hearing [what is told], and what is heard comes by the [preaching of the] message concerning Christ. |
Bible Question:
I have been exchanging posts with some atheists in an online forum about the reliability of the Bible. I have written that there are tens of thousands of extant manuscripts and that they all agree with each other, with only about 1 percent discrepancy. I wrote this because I have read numerous articles that say this. One of the atheists posted that John Mill documented 30,000 variations in the manuscripts he studied and that many of these inconsistencies involve accounts of Jesus virgin birth and resurrection. I found the reference to 30,000 inconsistencies in a Wikipedia article, but it doesnt give any detail about his findings and the pros and cons of his conclusions. Can anyone please explain this to me? Is Mills work a valid criticism of the manuscript consistency? Are the articles I have read about the NTs incredible level of manuscript accuracy correct? Thank you for your help,Kevin |
Bible Answer: Hello Kevo, While you've been given some good words on this question. I felt it might build your faith to hear a bit more of what is actually going on with these errors in the manuscripts. First of all we need to take an honest look at what was going on when they were copied. Most have heard stories about how reverently the Hebrew text was copied and how carefully they preserved it from error. This was done by professional scribes and even the slightest error found would cause the copy to be burned. However, when you come to the new testament documents this isn't what you see. What is happening then is largely uneducated people are copying letters written from the various apostles and evangelists. They are using very cheap materials and they don't have the training or financial means to just scrap them if one letter is wrong so that they can start again. So we would expect many errors in these manuscripts. However, also consider the nature of these errors. As you said something like 90 percent is in perfect agreement, but there is a more remarkable statistic. Of the errors, the vast vast majority are of what we would call a negligible nature. In other words its something like this: Four manuscripts read as follows... Jesus is the Son of God Jesus is the Sun of God Jeus is the Son of God Jesus is the Son of God This is a made up example, but bear with me. In these four "manuscripts" now we have already counted two errors. But look at the nature of the errors. Their source is so obvious (a mistaken letter, and somebody hearing and writing a phonetically identical word) that there is literally no doubt whatsoever as to what is the original author's writiing. This is the nature of the huge majority of "errors" in the manuscripts. Now, if one of these errors occur within a passage on the virgin birth, we can rightly say there is error in such passages, but they mean to make it sound like there is a significant variance in which one manuscript teaches something crucially different. Do you see how their words are true yet deceiving? Are there errors that can affect the sense of a passage? Yes, rare but yes. But even in these there are no errors that affect a passage's teaching of a doctrine that doesn't have ample teaching to show the error for what it is in other areas of scripture, or more often just in other copies of that manuscript. Most expect God to have preserved his word through one copy with no errors. But if that was the case how would we know it had never been tampered with? No shortage of wicked men have tried to alter scripture I suspect. But God has preserved his word by a sudden amazing spread of copies throughout all the known world at the time, so that if in any place and in any passage wicked men have altered his word, or have translated it carelessly through tired eyes, manuscripts throughout the world shout out corrections to it. So we have many errors, but many witnesses to the true writing of God's word, showing us clearly what it is. Such is the wisdom of God. In Christ, Beja |