Message: TRANSLATION: Did the Bible get to me intact?

Series: The Year of Lving Biblically

Se101710
YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
3. Transmission

So what did Santa get you for Christmas? I got an Amazon.com Kindle from my wife. It’s an electronic tablet into which you can download any book that Amazon sells, usually for 1/3 the cover price. It’s pretty neat.
- I bring it up because the first book I downloaded was Dan Brown’s new thriller, The Lost Symbol.
- And the reason I bring that up is to mention Dan Brown’s view of the Bible.

Dan Brown’s books are a lot of fun to read, but his Christian history which he claims is undisputable “FACT” is in fact highly disputable. I haven’t gotten far enough into Lost Symbol to see what sort of new shots he takes at the church, but in his old book, Da Vinic Code, he takes some shots at the Bible.

Here’s the comments he puts into the mouth of his Dr. Teabing character:

How many of you have ever thot the same thing? The fact is, this idea is circulating around a lot of lunch rooms and in a lot of minds today. We saw it in the man on the street interview on our first week of this series. Weren’t you surprised by how many people said, in essence,
The Bible might have had some original core of truth in it, but it’s been hopelessly mangled by time, by revisions and by editors with political and selfish agendas.

So today I want to deal with these objections head on. o What good is having a reliable, inspired WORD, if we do not have reliable COPY of that Word?

So let’s take this in two chucks: canonizing and copying.

1. CANONIZING
Canonizing deals with what books got chosen to be in the Bible. The word canon means literally “RULE” or ‘MEASURE”. The word describes the process of deciding which books measure up the standard of INSPIRATION.

Perhaps you’ve asked yourself before, “who got to decide what was inspired and what wasn’t inspired?”
- Maybe you thought some council of bishops actually voted on what books were and were not INSPIRED!
- So you thought, how do we know if they were right?
- Maybe some “bad” books got in? Maybe some inspired books were left out?”
- Maybe there a smoke filled room filled with grumpy old white men in tall hats some place inventing a Bible in the 5th century and claiming it was a true record of Jesus 400 years before?

Friends, I hope you hear what I’m going to say next because this idea is held by a lot of people – some you know or maybe by you and here’s the deal: it’s just FLAT OUT NOT TRUE. It’s laughably wrong. 5 minutes of Internet research by a 10th grader can dispel it. The only reason it still gets any play is because people WANT this conspiracy theory to be true. It coincides with the way they think the church works, in secrecy with scandal and lust for power.

So what I’m going to do today is tell you the story of how the Bible was put together. Please don’t take my word for it. Look up what I’m saying…


HOW THE BIBLE WAS MADE
Jesus ministry was completed in about 30 AD. Within a few years, his teachings, which were so memorably spoken in parables, were being passed on, probably verbally at first. Since Jesus died as a young man, the living eyewitnesses of his life and teachings would live on for many decades, and eventually they and their associates would write this down in what we know as gospels and letters.

These gospels were received by churches and started circulating. They were copied and recopied and spread around the Mediterranean. Within the times of those writings, they were ALREADY being given the weight of INSPIRED SCRIPTURE. By the end of the 1st century, 100 AD, all 27 books that are in the NT had been written and received.

By 130, within 100 years of Jesus death a clearly definable body of literature was emerging that carried the weight of authoritative testimony about Jesus. How do we know? Well, we have copies of church fathers who wrote in the 2nd century. In their writings, we see every one of the 27 books of today’s New Testament are cited by some church father as INSPIRED.

Then an interesting thing happened. It might have seemed bad at the time, but it actually helps us today have confidence in the fact that the Inspired books of the New Testament were not chosen out of thin air in the 5th century like Dan Brown seems to think. A bishop named Marcion came along in 150 AD teaching all sorts of weird stuff. He hated the Jews and rejected the Old Testament as the work of an Evil God. He rejected all the Gospels as too Jewish, except Luke and he cut and pasted other parts of the NT.

Friends, think about that. Basically everything some people say the Catholic Church did to the Bible, editing, selecting parts for their own special interests, cutting other parts out and doing it all in a secret chamber… well, this guy Marcion did all of that – in full public view – in AD150! The church didn’t commend that kind of behavior. They condemned it.

What happened next? Well, Marcion’s movement started to catch on and so the mainstream church had to respond. It wasn’t that they needed to establish a new bible to refute Marcion. What they needed was to simply REAFFIRM what all Christians had already been acknowledging organically from the beginning – that there were certain books that just measured up to the standard of INSPIRATION.

We’ll talk more about what those measuring sticks were in a second, but the next part of the story of how the Bible was put together, was that an unofficial list of books was put together in 170 AD called the Muratorian Canon. We don’t know who put it together, it’s just a fragment that tell us what books were Scripture and which were disputed… and that list contains all the books in your NT today except 2.

In the next 50 years or so, several other gospels were written by a new group called the Gnostics. These gospels carried familiar names like Peter and Thomas and Mary, but they were clearly not written by the REAL Peter or Thomas, because we know now they were written in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries… 150 years after these people had died.

What’s fascinating about the story of how the bible was put together is that not one of these Gnostic gospels was EVER considered for inclusion in the CANON. Friends, I mean, not even CONSIDERED. The thing is, other books WERE debated for many years, such as Hebrews, Revelation, and 2 Peter. But these Gnostic gospels which popular myth today says should have been equal competitors, weren’t even in the running!

So the church went along and in 367 AD we get the first official list of our 27 books in a letter from a church leader named Athanasius on Easter. And 30 years later that same list was ratified by two councils of church leaders in Africa. 

So what was their criteria for inclusion in the Bible? o Does that sound like a guy interested in inventing his own bible, editing another man’s work, corrupting a text to make it say what he wants?
 No, that sounds like a guy who wants get straight to get as close as he can to Jesus’, to find the earliest tradition.

That’s how it was done, friends. So AC3, no smoke filled rooms filled with grumpy old white guys in tall hats making crap up, OK? If you want to get technical, the bishops didn’t wear tall hats back then, and most of them were dark skinned as the councils were in AFRICA! Get it? It happened over a period of over 200 years, with books that were acknowledged as INSPIRED right out of the gate. And when official lists WERE made, the concern wasn’t to doctor them up… or slip in the latest ideas. The idea was to get the pristine testimony from the actual apostles of Jesus.

Now friends, I can’t categorically rule out the possibility that some book should have been included that wasn’t. We know Paul wrote other letters which we don’t have. And I can’t also prove conclusively that one book made it in that shouldn’t have. Martin Luther suspected this about the book of James.

But all in all, knowing the history of this, I feel pretty good about how it was put together . With very little debate, the same books, like cream, kept rising to the top, saying THIS is the inspired word of God. And finally, the fact is that if the books that WERE debated were somehow taken away, 2nd Peter, 3rd John, Revelation, James, Hebrews, the whole story still stands totally intact. So at some point, I just trust the providential hand of God has ensured that we have the books we were meant to have.

2. COPYING
Now, let’s turn to the next question about copying. Let’s assume we all trust the integrity of the process of how the Bible was put together. That still leaves 1700 years of church history – how did it get from them to us?

If you’ve been to Washington DC, you might have seen the actual first copy of the Declaration of Independence, signed by Thomas Jefferson. The fact is, we don’t have any originals of the Biblical manuscripts. That’s because until there was a printing press, every copy of the Bible was hand-transcribed.

Now last week, Dan said our doctrine of inspiration says that God superintended the authors in a special way, but that same supernatural aide isn’t guaranteed for the copyists. They can make mistakes. And if you look as the existing copies, no two are ever completely identical. Does that present a problem? Did the Bible get lost in transmission – as it was TRANSMITTED from generation to generation by hand copying?

There’s one guy out there who says yes. His name is Bart Erhman. Have you heard of this guy? He made the rounds a couple years ago selling his book MISQUOTING JESUS, showed up on John Stewart show. The subtitle of his book says it all:
“The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.”

Erhmann likes to say, there are more variations in the manuscripts of the NT than there are words in the New Testament. Over 400,000.

Imagine the telephone game. The telephone game is played by one person whispering a sentence in someone’s ear. Then that person tells the next person and on and on until it goes around the room. The fun of the game happens when the last person repeats the sentence out loud and it’s compared to the original sentence – invariably, the final version of the sentence is mangled beyond recognition. Hilarity ensues.

So the question is did this happen with the Bible?
How can we be certain of anything in the Bible if this telephone game was played? Here’s how. Because of God’s supernatural, providential oversight the Bible is unique in two ways. It is unique in how many manuscripts we have, and it’s unique in the age of manuscripts.

NUMBER OF MANUSCRIPTS
An average ancient document may have about a dozen existing manuscripts that confirm it’s message. Like Julius Caesar’s Gaulic Wars, it’s text is built on 10 surviving manuscripts.

So imagine our telephone game. If you have only one copies left, you have no real idea if that’s original. If you have two, and they differ at all, it’s 50/50 which reading is original. But let’s say you have 10 copies. And if you check them against each other, and 9 all say the same thing, with 1 that varies slightly. Now you’re 90% certain you have the original reading. The extra copies really provide help for what the original reading likely was.

Well the bible doesn’t have 10 surviving manuscripts. It doesn’t have 1000. AGE OF MANUSCRIPTS
OK, now what about the age of the manuscripts. Go back to our telephone game, and let’s imagine not one chain but 10 chains of 10 people each.  So let’s say you can still only check 10 people in the room, but instead of only checking the last person’s message, you can check anyone from the 2nd person in each line to the 10th. The farther back you go, the better idea you’ll get of exactly what the original message was.

Just like that, going back down the telephone game line is what happens when you find an older manuscript. You’re going farther back into history and getting closer to the original manuscript. And the farther back you go, the less chance of corruption.

Imagine the space between each person is like a scribe writing a copy 100 years apart. If there’s 10 people in line, then that’s 1000 years from original message to the last person in line. The average gap in ancient literature between time of writing and oldest surviving copy is about 1000 years. So with Julius Caesar’s Gaulic wars, we’re relying on manuscripts from about 1000 AD to faithfully tell us what Julius Caesar wrote down in 50 BC. That means we can only consult the last person in line.

But with the Bible the average age of a surviving copy is just 300 years from the time of writing and the oldest copy is less than 30 years. So imagine getting to consult the first person in every telephone game line! You’d be much more certain of your original copy yes?

I have 100 pictures on this screen and they’re all different. This is what Bart Erhman is talking about. Imagine these represent the whole body of NT manuscripts. There’s a lot of differences. But if you take how many copies we have, and how old they are, the original picture comes into very clear focus!

In fact after all the data is compiled, Bible scholar Daniel Wallace says:
The great majority of these variants are inconsequential—involving spelling differences that cannot even be translated, articles with proper nouns, word order changes, and the like…

Only 1% of the New Testament is actually uncertain what the original wording was. And in none of these cases is a vital area of Christian teaching affected. In Extended we’ll learn what some of those cases are and how different translators handle them.

But for right now, I leave you with a quote from Bart Erhman who after all his study of NT texts finally admits this:
“It is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christians texts was by and large a ‘conservative’ process. The scribes…were intent on ‘conserving’ the textual tradition they were passing on. Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition, but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow them. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited” (177). “It would be a mistake…to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the [sic] most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another” (55). “To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of changes found among the manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant…” (207).


2 Peter 1:16 For we were not making up clever stories when we told you about the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and his coming again. We have seen his majestic splendor with our own eyes.