“We believe the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is God’s Word.” This is on the “What We Believe” page of the web site of a church that I used to be a member of. Some churches even add “inerrant.” Sounds simple. Sounds obvious. Who could argue with this? I think the question that has to be asked is “what is the Bible?” The is a definite article, referring to a specific object, in this case a specific Bible. What is this specific Bible of which they speak? If I go to https://biblehub.com, I can count 33 English translations available there. Which of these 33 Bibles is the Bible? Why do we need 33 translations (there are more)? Which one is the “inerrant” one? I’m only discussing English Bibles here, but these questions are applicable to all other languages.
We must first agree that not one of us is reading the original Word of God. There are absolutely no original manuscripts in existence today. Everything we have are copies, copies of copies, painstaking, manual, hand-written copies. Being hand-written by fallible human beings means that inconsistencies and errors can be introduced into the texts as well as things can be omitted with no evidence that this has happened. The original manuscripts were authored long before Gutenberg invented the printing press. The printing press allowed for consistency in that every printing of a page is identical but that doesn’t mean they are correct. As one example we have The Wicked Bible. In that edition of the Bible, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was printed as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Wouldn’t that make life interesting? Should we consider this to be the Bible? Cedarville University writes about the history of the King James Version of the Bible stating, “There were almost 1000 editions printed from 1611 to 1769, all with minor corrections.” Are any of these almost 1000 the Bible? These are obviously not “inerrant” since they were correcting prior mistakes or refining translation and interpretation.
Traduttore, traditore – this Italian saying means “The translator is a traitor.” Relatively few of us can read the Bible in the languages that it was originally written in, so we depend upon translators to make the text accessible to us. We are putting a level of trust in the translator(s). The translator must, out of necessity, also interpret the text for us. Translation is not clean. A translator tries to choose the best word in the target language that conveys as much meaning as possible, as he interprets the source word, obviously, we hope, trying to put into the target language what the original author was trying to convey to his readers. Grammar also differs between the languages so the order of words and phrases may differ between the source and target languages when trying to convey the same meaning.
Let me provide an example from the Gospel of John, chapter 21. This is the story of Yeshua (Jesus) not long before his ascension, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee meeting with some of his disciples after a long night of fishing, catching nothing before He shows up. In the story, your English Bible says, three times Yeshua asks Kefa (Peter), “do you love me?” and three times Kefa responds in the affirmative saying, “you know that I love you.” I have heard pastors preach on this saying that Yeshua gave Kefa three opportunities to say “I love you” since Kefa had denied Yeshua three times. That is interesting and, maybe so. But, your English translation betrays you. The first two times Yeshua asks the question He says, “Do you love (agape in Greek) me?” Kefa responds, “You know that I love (phileo in Greek) you.” The third time Yeshua changes his question to use the word phileo and Kefa stays consistent in his response using phileo. Agape is a deeper love, unconditional love. Phileo is more of a brotherly/friendship love. Yeshua was asking Kefa for something more than Kefa was willing to give at that time. In English, we miss this dimension in the story.
The translator here is sort of stuck. There are no equivalent words in the English language to translate agape and phileo with the full meaning, so translators fall back to just using love as a catch-all. This is where he is a traitor to the source language as he leaves meaning behind. He is also a traitor to the reader since the reader receives a product missing some of the depth and meaning. This is not meant to denigrate the translators. I am very thankful that there are translators since I only speak English. Without the translators, I wouldn’t really have access to the Scriptures.
So, back to our question, “What is the Bible?” Maybe we should define that as the text as delivered to holy men of YeHoVaH (God) as they were inspired to write by the Holy Spirit. Again, none of those manuscripts exist today since they were originally written on media that degrades over time. Many scribes over millennia manually copied those manuscripts onto new media to give the text a new life that allowed it to be preserved ultimately into our day. Because of this manual process, inconsistencies crept into the copies that became the sources of future copies. Verses could be inserted or deleted to serve an agenda (For a very good discussion on this I highly recommend watching and considering the discussion in Does John 6:4 Belong in the New Testament). Sometimes glosses, marginal or interlinear notes, got incorporated into the text as if they were always there, becoming the source of future copies. Sometimes verses were left out, either intentionally or unintentionally. All of this is to say, we have thousands of manuscripts today from which our Bibles are compiled, not all the manuscripts agree 100%. The people compiling our Bibles make decisions about which version of a particular verse to include and which to ignore. Frequently we don’t even know there are other possible versions or interpretations.
We have been told by the “experts” that the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek. Are these experts correct? We should be able to question that. It would be hard to argue that Hebrew isn’t the language that the Hebrew Israelites wrote in. What should be questioned is why the Jewish Messiah and his group of Jewish Apostles would do all their writing in Greek (Jewish here is defined as Israelites of the tribe of Judah, not the practitioners of the religion of Judaism). What language did they speak to each other? Hebrew. Scripture says that they were in the Synagogue every Shabbat (Sabbath). Acts 15 tells us that Moses (the Torah) is read every Sabbath in the Synagogue. The Torah is written in Hebrew. Yeshua read from Isaiah 61 in Luke 4. The scrolls in the Synagogue are written in Hebrew. Papias, a disciple of the Apostle John, wrote that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew and others came and did their best to translate it. Is there any evidence of this? Well, yes there is. George Howard published a book, Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, which was preserved by Shem Tov when he wrote a book, Eben Bohan, so that the Jews would be able to learn about Christianity so they could hold their own in the Disputations in the 1400s in Spain. Shem Tov included the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew as an appendix. It was ignored for a long time because it was assumed that it was just translated from Greek. George Howard, and now others, studied it and concluded that it was an original Hebrew document, not translated from Greek. Recently, there has been published a translation of the Cochin Hebrew Revelation. You can download your copy here and watch a series of YouTube videos going through it. Let’s think about this, the book of Revelation is Yeshua telling John to write what He tells him to write. Do we really think that during this exchange that Yeshua dictated to John what to write in Greek?
The Jewish/Hebrew Bible is limited to what Christians call the “Old Testament.” It is called the Tanakh meaning Torah (instructions/Law), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings). The Christian Bible adds the “New Testament,” which in Hebrew is Brit Chadashah, which would be better translated as New/Renewed Covenant. Whether you are Jewish or Christian will affect what you would consider the Bible.
By all means, the God of the Universe, YeHoVaH, preserved his Word for us to this day. That said, it is not exactly the words originally written/given. It would have been great if Moses would have had an iPhone to record his discussions with YeHoVaH; if he had an iPad or MacBook so we could have a PDF of his original writings. If “the cloud” would have existed (not the cloud that was over Mt Sinai) to store those PDFs and recordings for us today. Those copies would have been exact. That is not what YeHoVaH chose to preserve for us. YeHoVaH, speaking through Jeremiah in the 29th chapter says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” Also, Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.” He wants us to be active and searching. He says he conceals things but says we are to search out the answers. He expects us to search and in Jeremiah he says that we can find Him. He expects us to dig deep. We will need multiple translations of the Bible, we will need a concordance, we should listen to others that have studied and then be a Berean to see if what they say is true.
Search and find HIM!
New here? Consider reading the introduction here.
John, you have done an excellent job presenting this material in a concise, and truthful way. May Yehovah continue to richly Bless you and show you great favor. Shalom