An 11-Day Study On Challenges To Biblical AuthoritySample

HAS THE BIBLICAL TEXT BEEN CORRUPTED OVER THE CENTURIES?

Have you ever been reading the Bible and come across a passage set off in brackets and then followed by a footnote? Next, you follow the footnote and discover that this particular passage is not found in the earliest manuscripts (e.g., John 8:1–13; Mark 16:9–20). You ask yourself, How can the Bible be the Word of God if we aren’t sure which texts should be included?

Is the biblical text accurate? To put it bluntly, how do we know that what was written in the first century is what we have today in the twenty-first century?

Big questions about the Bible like this have gone mainstream. Questioning the Bible has become big business. Just ask TV’s Discovery and History channels as they continue to roll out shows challenging what people have been traditionally taught about Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity. Conversations that used to occur only in dusty academic journals are now taking place in primetime on shows like Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and on the big screen in films like The Da Vinci Code (based on the runaway bestselling book by Dan Brown). The bottom line is that the church can no longer ignore these questions.

THE PROBLEM WITH ANCIENT DOCUMENTS

To begin, you need to know that none of the original manuscripts of either the Old or New Testaments are still in existence—all that remains are imperfect copies. But this is the same situation for every other ancient work of literature; e.g., Plato, Livy, Herodotus, Thucydides. No one has the originals. (There are several natural explanations for this; manuscripts could be lost, worn-out through copying, damaged by insects or rodents, rot or decay due to the climate, or even be destroyed by foreign armies.) This may come as a surprise, but this fact should not turn us into skeptics regarding ancient texts. Scholars use the copies we have discovered to reconstruct the original classical writings and the Old and New Testaments.

Generally speaking, the more copies we have to examine, and the closer they are to when they were written, the better. This practice of reconstruction is known as textual criticism.

IS THE “TELEPHONE GAME” A HELPFUL ANALOGY?

Before we explore textual criticism further, we need to discuss the telephone game. Many of us grew up playing the telephone game with friends or at birthday parties. Basically, one person sitting in a circle whispers a message to the player on his right, who then turns to the next person and repeats the message. That person turns and restates the message; finally, the last player announces the message to the entire group. However, this analogy is often applied to the transmission of the New Testament. If the copying process was this unstable and error-filled, then we should be skeptical of the biblical text.

Nevertheless, this is not a good analogy of how the text of the New Testament has come down to us. Here are just a few reasons why. First, the telephone game is linear (person A to B to C to D . . .), whereas the copying process was not one-to-one, like individual links in a chain. When it comes to the text of the New Testament, there are multiple lines of transmission, and the original documents were very probably copied several times, and as we will see below, we have access to earlier copies to compare with later copies (think branches spreading out and descending from a tree). Next, the telephone game is verbal, while the text was written, and so the words and phrases can be examined along the way. In the telephone game, the person only has the last person in line to interrogate; with Scripture text, earlier texts are often available to inspect.

Finally, life, death, and eternity usually do not hang in the balance at a birthday party! In other words, if Jesus really was who he claimed to be and the offer of eternal life was legitimate, then there would have been a high degree of motivation among the copiers to get this message right.